Taking it slow

Life in lockdown is not so different from normal life for me. I don't have small children out of school to worry about and I can work from home with no great difficulty. With Mike and Child2 here with me, I don't feel particularly isolated, and I'm still in regular contact with my father and my aunt in England. We have plenty of space for a long walk with the dog (although he's getting on a bit and not as keen on a long walk as he once would have been...). I know we are luckier than a lot of people who are cooped up with less ability to get out in the fresh air.

What has changed is the pace of things. Not that my life Before was exactly a whirlwind of activity, but now I am not rushing to get out of the house before 7.30 to see my mother-in-law in her nursing home before going off to work, things feel much more leisurely. The library where I normally work was closed to staff from 23 March and I went in on the 24th to finish some jobs and pick up a few things (including the office orchid!). Working from home involves connecting to my desktop remotely and this can be a frustrating experience: there's a bit of a lag across the network and it feels like I am working in slow motion most of the time.

I think my brain is on a go-slow anyway, with a low-level background level of panic which actually reminds me of my state of mind back in May 2007, just before we left England for Canada. It's quite hard to concentrate on anything for any length of time: reading fiction seems beyond my capabilities at present, for example, and my sleep is disturbed. I feel unproductive as a result, but I am not going to beat myself up about that: if we can't make exceptions for ourselves in exceptional times, then when can we?

Outside of work, I'm focusing on watching the garden come back to life and getting comfort from the usual cycles of plants and wild birds. Humans might be making a mess of things, but Mother Nature is still doing her thing. Hope you are safe and well wherever you are reading this.

Still here...

I thought I'd better post an update in case anyone is wondering why I haven't been posting much recently. The main reason is that I'm back working full-time again, for the first time since moving to Canada. Carving out time for gardening is one issue, but finding time for blogging about it is quite another!

I'm working as the archivist for the County of Hastings and the City of Belleville. I took over the job on a temporary contract last July, and was appointed on a permanent basis in March. In the first nine months I had to move the entire archive to a new location, which was quite a challenge but we are now safely in the new building and settling in. I am loving it.

In other news, Mike's mother has finally received permission to move to Canada as a permanent resident. (We got this news the same day I heard about getting the permanent job - a red-letter day!) We first applied for her to come over in April 2010, so it has been a long process, but now we can move ahead at last. The to-do list has grown again, but at least we can now make definite plans for bringing her here and making changes to the house to accommodate her. Exciting times!

Spring progress report

It is beginning to get warm enough for me to get started on the Spring jobs. Looming largest in my thoughts was the need to empty the chicken enclosure of the accumulation of winter litter. But I couldn't do that until the chickens were willing to spend some time outside. They aren't happy about walking in the snow, so I needed most of the snow to be gone before I could contemplate the task.

Here's the orchard on March 26th:

Still fairly snowy: the Buff Orpingtons were willing to brave the conditions, but none of the other breeds fancied leaving the coop.

By yesterday most of the snow had gone and the birds were spending their time outside. Here they are this morning. There was a light scattering of snow overnight, but not enough to bother them.

It took two hours of shovelling to get the barn free of the woodchips and chicken detritus of the winter. And there was a rat's nest. With baby rats in it. I won't say any more about that...

The resulting chicken manure heap is huge! You can see that there's still quite a lot of snow behind it.

There are some signs of life in the greenhouse. These seedlings are coming up in the bed where I sowed peas. They're clearly not peas, but I'm hoping they are something edible, so I'll leave them for now.

It's suddenly a lot easier to walk up past the barns, with the snow going. There is still a lot of ice in places - this patch along the fence line is a good ten inches thick!

I was actually quite grateful for the continued cold weather, as our fridge went wrong on the 25th of March and was out of action for  a week. I put our cool box into service and stationed it on the porch. Fortunately the weather stayed at fridge temperature for the whole week, so we didn't have any problem keeping things cold.

It wasn't the most convenient location for a fridge, but having all the food out on the porch did turn out to be a very effective deterrent against snacking!

The flaw in the door

As we had a spare door after the bathroom work was finished, Mike thought he'd replace Child2's bedroom door with it. A few problems with one of the old hinges and one or two curse words later, the door was in place.

Here it is, fully closed up.

Turns out the bathroom door was two inches narrower than this bedroom door. So perhaps not such a good idea after all. We tried selling the improved ventilation angle to Child2 but he wasn't impressed. His old door is now back in its original place.

This house never stops surprising us with its little idiosyncrasies...

Busy Sunday

After being out for much of Saturday, today was one of those racing-to-catch-up sort of Sundays. Tomorrow, work starts on replacing our bathroom and there was a lot of preparation and general tidying up I wanted to do (the new bathroom is going to take part of Child1's closet, so we had to get her room organised, too). Everyone mucked in, though, and it feels like we're making progress.

The bathroom has been on the 'to do' list for a while. I think it is the same age as the house: early 1970s, and it looks it. I can't bear to put a big picture of it up, so here's a small one. You can see that the suite is a very 1970s shade of pale brown. Not sure if there was an official name for this - I know that the downstairs toilet we had was called 'Harvest Gold' (a shade that can best be described as vomit-yellow*).

The basin in the current bathroom is metal and has several rusty patches on it, while the toilet uses a Niagara Falls-like quantity of water each time it's flushed. The whole room is a bit of an embarrassment and it had got to the point where we replaced it or we turned it into a museum of the 1970s bathroom. It'll be great to get it finished, even though it will be annoying in the short-term while the work is being done.

In between cleaning and tidying up I had to do something with the ridiculous number of tomato peppers we've been picking. The chicken manure I added to the greenhouse beds has created our biggest crop ever of these.

Luckily, they're easy to deal with. I just cut off the tops, remove the seeds (some of which I keep for next year's crop), cut the peppers in half and put them in freezer bags. I use a drinking straw to suck out the air, which helps them keep for longer.

We ate the huitlacoche (a.k.a. corn smut) today. I cooked it with some onion, garlic and part of a cayenne pepper, then used the mixture to fill burritos. Well, 'fill' is the wrong word (there wasn't enough for that), so I topped it off with grated mozzarella cheese before cooking the burritos. They tasted fine: a cross between mushrooms and corn. The children refused to touch them, but Mike was willing enough. I don't think he ever checks up on what I'm feeding him, to see if I'm telling the truth about whether it's edible or not. He'd be awfully easy to poison...

*Sorry.

Mother's Day

Yesterday I set up my stall in the library in Deseronto again for the annual Sidewalk Sale. If the weather had been better, I would have been outside and there would have been lots of customers. As it was, it was cold, windy and wet and, consequently, very quiet indeed. I didn't manage to sell as many seedlings as I did last year. But it was only two fewer, so not terribly bad. One thing I changed this year was the range of tomatoes: there had been one would-be customer last year who had wanted beefsteak tomatoes, which I didn't have. This year, I grew Marmande tomatoes and the same man came back and bought 12 of them. Which shows that it pays to listen to your customers, I suppose!

Child1 came with me and was a great help in setting up and taking down the stall. During the (many) quiet spells of our stay our location next to one of the public access computers turned out to be ideal for her. I sat and read one of the library books - so it was ideal for me, too!

Today is Mother's Day and it is the first time that we've actually had one of our mothers here in Canada for the day itself. We put a bit of an effort into setting the table for lunch for once: the lilacs are in full bloom already, which provided an easy bit of floral colour (flower-arranging not being one of my strengths), as well as being a reminder of the mother who was missing.

I always feel ambivalent about Mother's Day: I know it's a fairly ancient idea, compared to Father's Day and Grandparents' Day, but even when my own mother was alive I thought it was a celebration designed only to provoke guilt and spending (and sadness, if you'd like to be a mother but can't be).

However, my cynical old iceberg of a soul is capable of being partially melted when I'm presented with something like this:

Although (if I'm completely honest) it may have been the correct placement of the apostrophe that caused me the greatest delight. ;-)

Happy New Year?

I was thinking a lot about yesterday about New Year's Eve 1999. We spent it with my parents, playing games, no doubt drinking too much, and generally having a lovely time (we had two children under the age of two, so didn't get to do much socialising!). It was a perfect start to the new millennium. Mum died two years later and I found that the memories of that night filled me with incredible sadness on this ten-year anniversary. By the time I went to bed last night I was feeling utterly grief-stricken. Not how you're supposed to be feeling on New Year's Eve.

I couldn't sleep, but gradually a narrative began to form itself out of my feelings. A lot of this has been drifting around in my mind for a while now, but something about last night's belated mourning brought forth words to describe it all. It may be completely inappropriate to share them, but it seems important to do so, if only so that I can stop looking back and turn to face the New Year with a more cheerful state of mind.

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April: The Burial of the Dead

WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,          

And bathed every veyne in swich  licour,          

Of which vertu engendred is the flour[1]

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding 

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing        

Memory and desire, stirring      

Dull roots with spring rain.[2]

2002

I've always had ambiguous feelings about April. Even before my mother died in that month.

She had gone into hospital on the Tuesday, nearly unconscious. When I saw her on the Thursday morning she had come back to herself and was joking, as ever.

"How do you like my black eye?" she asked. She'd fallen out of bed a few days earlier and had an impressive shiner. Her next questions were more disturbing.

"Where am I?" she wondered. On being told, she then asked "How long have I been here?"

There was an apple tree in blossom in the yard between her ward and the next one (it was an old part of the hospital, all on one floor and laid out on the ground in the shape of a television-aerial). But the tree was behind her bed and she could not see it. Would never see it.

By the time I returned in the evening, she was no longer able to speak to my brother and to me. They moved her onto a different ward, a chest ward. Her breathing was becoming laboured and the pneumonia was taking hold. The patient in the bed opposite seemed to be quite mad; offering comic relief to the grim situation in which we found ourselves.

The next day, one of my mother's friends brought in a red flower in a pot. By then, it was clear to us all that this was Mum's final illness, that she would not be leaving the hospital. The gift would have been perfect if Mum had been able to see it, if she would be taking it home with her after getting better. As things were, it seemed terribly wrong.

When Dad collected Mum's effects after her death in the early hours of the Sunday morning, he fretted over not getting her reading glasses back, before realising that he would have no use for them. I found myself regretting the loss of the inappropriate red flower.

When her own mother had died (another April: almost exactly six years earlier), Mum had gone to see her body in the nursing home. It was still warm, she told me, and she'd held her hand and been glad to see her at peace, free of the worry that had always been part of her in life. Perhaps this memory was in my mind when I went to see Mum in her coffin at the funeral home. She had been in a terrible state when I'd seen her last in the hospital and I wanted to erase that memory with something more soothing.

She did look restful, although the undertakers' skill had not managed to disguise the bruising around her right eye. I picked flowers from her garden to put on her coffin. I would have liked to put lilac blossoms on there too (there was a lovely lilac tree in Mum's garden), but they were not yet in flower, whatever Eliot might have written. The tree later blew down in a gale. On Mum's birthday.

2007

Five years passed and on the anniversary of Mum's admission to hospital we were house-hunting. In Canada. Her death had cut a cord that was anchoring me to the land of my birth and we were now at the end of the long process of emigrating. On that day, 16 April, we found the house that would become the future focus of our lives. The weather was terrible: driving rain and snow (not quite Chaucer's 'sweet showers'). In the house, the kitchen woodstove was warming and welcoming. Here there was the space to build the small-holding that my mother had once dreamed of creating. I would plant an orchard and watch the apple trees blossom. There were lilacs in bud all around the building. I knew that I'd come home.

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[1] Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (Prologue, lines 1-4)

[2] T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland, (lines 1-4)

Sleeping under newspapers

Now that the alumin(i)um wiring has all gone, we could finally get round to putting a decent layer of insulation in the attic. I'd say 'loft', but I recently discovered that attic≠loft in Canadian English. Though I'm not entirely clear on the distinction - so any clarification welcome!

We now have a snug 15-inch layer of recycled newsprint above our heads (it has been converted into fluff and treated to make it fire- and pest-resistant, I feel I should point out). This brings the R-value of the attic's insulation up to 50 from its previous level of around 10. Should make it a bit warmer upstairs on these cold winter nights...

Smiling skies

This interesting upside-down rainbow was produced by the late-afternoon sun shining on some high clouds directly over our house. Not something I've ever seen before. I took it as a sign of approval for my morning's activity of helping my daughter tidy up her bedroom. This was a two to three hour task which took all of my archival organisation skills (and a LOT of patience) to complete. Her worldly possessions are now sorted and neatly stacked in boxes or lined up on shelves. For the record, the categories of a 10 year old girl's goods are these:

• Barbie
• Books
• Boxed games
• Hard toys ('miscellaneous', really)
• Littlest Pet Shop/Polly Pockets
• Soft toys and baby doll paraphenalia
• Tat (possibly the largest category: this ended up in a garbage bag)

Her floor is now visible, though how long this state of affairs will last, I do not know.

I was rewarded with a lovely sunset last night, too.

Domestic disorder

In my absence the solar panels have been installed. Don't they look great? I thought the old weathervane on the barn roof would be obscured by the panels, so was glad to see that it is still visible.

Inside the house, the kitchen has been completely gutted (the stove is the only thing in it now) and we are surrounded by dust and boxes full of kitchen clobber. I know it'll be worth it in the end, but it feels hard to lead a normal life at the moment. Maybe I should have stayed away for another week...

Geothermal progress

There have been guys in the house on and off for a couple of weeks now, putting in the ducting for the geothermal system. Today the drilling rig turned up and started on the first of the five deep wells that will be needed to sink the pipes down into the rock (we don't have enough depth of soil to lay the pipes horizontally). They needed 300 gallons of water to do the drilling, which they took from our well. It's lucky they weren't trying to do this last year, as there wouldn't have been 300 gallons in there then.
Unfortunately the weather decided to bring a slow-moving thunderstorm to the Bay of Quinte area this morning, so they didn't get very far before deciding to give up for the day (being understandably reluctant to stand next to a tall metal post in such conditions). The Weather Network's satellite picture shows it pretty clearly:
Inside the house, conversely, the work is continuing apace - there are now grilles like the one below in the floors of the downstairs as well as vents in the ceilings of the upper floor (those look a bit like smoke alarms). In the picture below you can see through to the window in the basement, but they're busily connecting all the grilles up to ducting and the geothermal unit in the basement, so that won't be the case for long.


Here's the view in the basement. Very shiny. The big silver box in the lower middle of the shot is the geothermal unit.

Loose end tied up

We handed possession of our house in Sale over to its new owners today. What a relief. The first sale fell through in September last year and then this one was being delayed by a bolshy pair of first-time buyers at the beginning of the chain. We've had a bottle of champagne chilling in the fridge since before Christmas, waiting for this moment. It's just about at the right temperature now.

Owning the house was like having an anchor attached to our new life here, holding us back financially in terms of being able to start new projects, but more significantly, being a constant background source of stress. Being part of a fragile will-they-won't-they house-buying chain was part of it, but there was also the worry of being the owners of an empty house in Greater Manchester. It was broken into, two weeks ago, which was almost inevitable, given that it has been empty for nine months. Luckily no major damage was done, but it was something we could have done without.

So tonight we're raising our glasses to the new owners and hoping that they'll be as happy there as we were.

Family Day

We arrived in Ontario in time for a new public holiday (announced last October) - today is Family Day, which owes its existence to a guy with a cocaine addiction. So perhaps not the most auspicious of holidays. We had a friend of child #2's over for much of the day and I made pizza and cookies to keep them sustained, in between trying to do some work. Working remotely on UK projects is fine, but it gets slightly peculiar when there's a public holiday here that isn't celebrated in the UK. We've decided that the noise made by children is equal to the number of children squared. One is fine (lovely and quiet, in fact); two make the noise of four and that's bad enough, but three create a noise equivalent to nine and that makes it extremely hard to concentrate.

In the evening we belatedly celebrated Chinese New Year with crispy duck and pancakes. This was an occasional treat when we lived in Sale (where we lived a five-minute walk from a Chinese take-away). There are Chinese restaurants around here (by that I mean within a half-hour drive), but we've yet to go into one. I found a good recipe for the pancakes online and, in a spirit of self-sufficiency, made it all from scratch (apart from the hoisin sauce). The pancakes don't look as round and purely white as the ones we got in England, but they're not as hard to make as they sound.

We finally exchanged contracts on the house in Sale today, so that was another reason to celebrate.

Wicked winds

These are part of the new roof that was installed back in October. You may have noticed that they're not on the roof. Yesterday was quite blowy: our weather machine registered a high wind speed of 25 metres per second, which is 56 miles, or 90 kilometres, an hour, if my sums are right. So not hugely high (especially as the roof was supposed to be able to survive 80mph), but high enough to do some damage. Dean the roofer is coming back tomorrow.

We also finally lost the side door of the small barn, which had been looking a bit sorry for itself ever since we arrived. I'm actually glad about that casualty, because it was a pain to open and close in its previous, hanging-on-by-a-hinge, state.

Twelfth Night

The decorations are all down now and everything's looking a bit bare, so I thought I'd decorate the blog to keep Christmas going until the last minute. I've always thought that this last day of Christmas would be an ideal one for a party: people often feel a bit low after the holiday and somehow the feasting and jollity never lasts the whole twelve days. I think that the retail trade is to blame for this - the shops certainly don't have any incentive to keep Christmas going past the 25th. Perhaps there should be an official Twelfth Night holiday to keep the festive momentum going for the traditional number of days. They certainly celebrated it properly this side of the Atlantic in the past.

We've invested in a proper whistling stove-top kettle for the woodburner, which must be conserving a fair amount of electricity, the number of times we boil a kettle every day. It's also a very cheering sight in that rather dark corner of the kitchen.

Outside, we've had another mild break in the weather and the snow is turning to slush again. I'm hoping that these melting periods are good news for the water table and for my vegetable and fruit plans. I've spent much of the weekend poring over seed catalogues and attempting to decide what we'll be growing this year. When I had two small raised beds I only ever ordered from one catalogue. Now I've got three catalogues (and one more due to arrive soon) and I'm a bit overwhelmed with choice. As I had to leave all my old seeds back in England, I'm starting from having nothing (apart from one packet of rocket and one of lettuce). My growing area is also so much bigger that I'm not so restricted in what I can grow: I've never grown potatoes or winter squashes before, for example.

I'm also surprised by the considerable variations in price between the three catalogues, for the same seeds. One is American, one Canadian and one British. Usually the US and Canadian products are cheaper, but not always. I've ended up creating an Excel spreadsheet to track everything. I'm sure I'll end up ordering far too much, but hope that most of the seeds will keep for a few years at least, if I put them somewhere cold and dark. Somehow I suspect that I'll still be putting in an order in 2009, but maybe I'll manage to restrict myself to just the one supplier next year.

Stoker, Second Class

It was -15°C this morning, so we decided that we'd light the stove in the kitchen as well as the one in the living room. It's much bigger, so kicks out an impressive amount of heat. Both our smoke alarms went off as the dust on the top of the stove burnt off (can't think how it got there) - so at least we know they're working. It's possible to boil a kettle on the stove-top (if you're not in a huge hurry for a cuppa, that is), so there's the added benefit of having another cooking surface while we've got it alight. The only drawback is that with two fires going, you feel as though you're a bit of a slave to refuelling them.

Postscript: It turns out to be the perfect place to prove bread dough, too! Might have to go mad and buy a proper kettle though. This one was bought for a camping trip in 1990 and is a bit on the small side.

Finishing touches

Our curtains arrived yesterday, so at last the living room looks finished. Seems like a very long time ago now that we only had folding chairs and a toy box for furniture.

Here's a picture I've been trying to take for ages, but every time I show up with the camera the dog moves, or uncrosses his legs. Mike managed to snap him last night:

Next big step

The house is now on the market - had our first potential buyer round today.

I wanted to make some hot cross buns this morning, but then wondered if I should, as the potential buyer might think I was trying the old trick of filling the house with baking smells to help sell it. Went ahead anyway (they were only proving in the oven when she came round, so she probably didn't notice at all).

I've developed a kind of spring-cleaning frenzy and wondered whether I'd hit a new obsessive level when I found myself cleaning the overflow hole on our basin with a cotton bud this morning. Hope the house sells quickly, I'm not sure I can keep this up.