Team Ed Ride

The 50 km bike ride I did for charity was last weekend on Sunday. I would have blogged about it earlier but I had to wait until my fingers stopped hurting. This is us before the start, "While we are all still smiling" I think was the quote.
It wasn't so bad really. I had a couple things going in my favour.
Everyone else was ill, with colds or asthma or whatever and that meant that I could keep up with all the regular cyclists most of the time. Yay for viruses!
Also, I have a great bike. I will admit to stressing about my bike before the ride. My bike is so old that when Peter went to buy new tires for it, the guy in the shop told him that Cannondale hadn't made a bike with 24" rims for 20 years. My bike is an antique. And I went looking for a new bike last year and realized that there are a lot of new and improved features to modern bikes, like shock absorbers and more gears and big rims that make mine look like a Model T Ford. Happily, my group were not the up to date, hard core set I was expecting, and I am so grateful for that.
I will admit to being a little intimidated when I learned they were part of a cycling club that did this ride every Thursday evening.
We were 6 in our group and that is a good number. We cycled mostly together, or in twos chatting as the scenery went by. It gave us all a chance to learn more about each other, and I will say that those other five people were an interesting and diverse bunch. This was such a good experience.
I want to add that the best part of getting my bike on the road again is how you feel so much more connected to the scenery. I could smell the lilacs (and the chicken barns) and hear the birds and feel the road surface. When I was practising before hand, I would cycle past people and they would wave, or say hello, or nod. Other cyclist would call out too. I have driven the route we took many times, but doing it on a bicycle made it a completely different experience.

As we passed the end of our driveway, Peter and our friend Lynn were cheering us on with the Dog as Official Team Ed Dog (note the sign around her neck.) I had forgotten to mention the Cheering section to anyone else, so most of the group were wondering who those people were and how they knew we were coming.
On the way back, we stopped in for a photo op and chance to pee.
We had variable weather. It was cool in the morning, and looked very dark and foreboding as we were on our way to the start point at Clock Park in Wolfville. By the time we were at Star's Point it was clear and sunny, we all stripped off our extra clothes in Kingsport and except for the stiff wind sideways on the Port Williams dyke coming back the ride we had excellent riding weather.
The last leg of the ride across the Port Williams dyke up to Greenwich Corner and then the home stretch from Greenwich to Wolfville was the most grueling part of the ride. Besides wind and hills, I could feel my energy waning, and there were a few fleeting thoughts of just stopping and sticking out my thumb to a passing car. Beer kept me going but in my darkest thoughts, I remembered that the Port Pub was closer than Paddy's. I was trailing behind, if I stopped would anyone notice? When we rolled in to Wolfville at 12:10 we all headed for the pub, for the reward of a fry up breakfast and beer.
Between Toronto and Nova Scotia we raised around $5700 for the Princess Margaret Research Foundation. Thanks for all your support.

Rainy May, It May Rain

Happy Victoria Day weekend. Three weeks have flown by. Most of the days this month were rainy. It got everyone down and the morning radio hosts were complaining that mushrooms were growing in their hair. Work was frustrating as we completed as much inside work as we could and then after two weeks we finally had to brave the wet and do some outside things anyway.
Peter has been very busy doing everything but the PhD research this month. He had an interesting day of sewer maintenance on May 3.He constructed a wood shed. It looks remarkable like a green house I know, but plastic is cheaper than almost anything else and the solar gain will dry out the wood.All three motorcycles run. This is ironic because usually we are so busy in spring that the motorcycles get pushed back and we aren't riding them until June or July. This year they are ready to go, as soon as the sun comes out. If it ever comes out.

We were unsuccessful in selling the older bikes last fall, but we relisted them on the KIJIJI site and he sold Binky last Friday. Bye Bye Binky, I will miss you. Still looking for a buyer for the Virago though.

He also sold a friend's lawn mower for her this weekend.

The weather finally cleared a little last week and we set up the pool Thursday night after our first day of sun in two weeks. Because there has been so much rain and because we no longer use the well as our main source of water, we just turned the pump on and started filling the pool on Thursday evening. We figured there is as much water in the well as there ever would be so we didn't need to worry about running it dry. Saturday Peter shocked it with chlorine and the water went orange. We weren't sure if it was brown algae or rust. After some internet research it is apparently rust. Since we have only been using the well for making tea and for the greenhouse water (and not much there because of the rain) and maybe because there is so much ground water right now that leaching is occuring, there is a lot of iron built up and when he added the chlorine shock it reacted to the iron. My research says the most effective thing is to filter it with cotton socks and batting. So we did that today and it is amazing how well it works. The water is only red tea colour now.
He also set up the solar heater and made some modifications. The temperature of the heater water Sunday afternoon when the sun finally came out was 35 degrees C while the air temperature was only 15. Wow.

Saturday I went to a fundraiser Plant Sale with my neighbour and laid out a space to make a new garden bed for all the sun plants I am unable to resist. The veg garden is growing well, and now that we squirrel proofed the greenhouse the seedlings are coming along OK too.
My bicycling is getting better. Sunday I biked to Kingsport and back from here. Kingsport is 2 kms and the first bit is all up hill and against the wind. I had to rest at the beach for 10 minutes before I could turn around. When I got home I had to rest on the couch for 20 minutes before I could move. That was only 4 kms but it nearly killed me.
This morning I went the other direction to Canning for bread, and it was mostly downhill on the way so I did an extra loop around the village before I headed back. The ride up hill wasn't as bad as I thought and I was surprised that I didn't need to rest when I got home. I may be able to go out again this afternoon for a second run. I need all the training I can get I think.

Team Ed Charity Ride

Every year there is a charity bike ride to raise money for brain cancer research at the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation in Toronto. Team Ed, is a group of people who ride in memory of Ed Poty who died of brain cancer 9 years ago. I didn't know Ed, but I know his wife, my friend Sharon, and she does a ride here in Nova Scotia because she no longer lives in Toronto.
For the past two years, I have participated in the Team Ed Ride by showing up at the end of the ride and eating a greasy breakfast at the pub. I was good with that, but this year Sharon challenged me to do more. Now, as my normal two wheeled conveyance has an 850 cc motor to make it go, I thought this sounded so retro that I had to try it.
Today I put new tires on my bicycle because the ride is in two weeks and I need to get out and practice beforehand so I don't puke. I needed new tires because I haven't ridden my bike for 8 years and when I tried to inflate them last year they exploded. After I put on the new tires, I took it for a spin down the road to Kingsport to see if I could still remember how. It really is like riding a bike. Unfortunately I got as far as the winery (about 800 metres) and decided that was enough for the day. (I'm thinking now that may die. but it is too late to back out because I have registered and have a fund raising page and everything!)
In Nova Scotia, we are cycling from Wolfville to Kingsport and back on Sunday June 5. We are taking the scenic Wellington Dyke route and it will be about 50kms all told. Go to the website and search for my name under participants to sponsor me. If I live, I promise the blog post will be worth it.

http://pmhf3.akaraisin.com/Common/Event/Home.aspx?seid=4111&mid=8

What did you do this weekend?

Not so much house reno as house maintenance. After digging up the drive to install the water line, it got very mucky and rutted in the spring thaw. We first tried to use field stones in the ruts to firm it up and hoped that they would act like cobblestones, but that was a disaster. We talked about getting a man with a digger to grade it and fix up the ditch that ran along side. We talked about doing it by (gasp) hand. We even looked into renting a machine and driving it ourselves. We were waffling about the work and the price of all these options. On Saturday though, our neighbours had a digging machine in their yard to look for the septic tank which they suspected needed pumping. They had spent several hours looking for it with shovels and long poles without success and had decided to get in a professional. We took advantage of that event to ask the guy if he would do some things for us. In about an hour with no physical or organizational effort on our part required at all, it was all done.
He dug the ditch.
He graded the drive. He pulled out several tree stumps that still had massively long roots attached.
He levelled a spot for the new wood shed.
Peter was so happy he couldn't stop grinning.
It cost a $100.
Then, we considered that our septic system hadn't been pumped for several years so we decided to find our tank, and unlike the neighbours, we mostly knew where to look because it was new when we bought the house 8 years ago. I took pictured so we would remember where to look next time, because you only do this every few years. We are not sure if it needs to be pumped or not, but we will call and try to piggy back onto our neighbour's house call now that it is all dug up.
I started back to work this week, and except one particularly gruelling day I didn't feel as bad as expected. I did get a sunburn on Thursday because the weather went from cold and rainy to hot and muggy in about 3 minutes and apparently it was sunny for at least some of the time.These are a couple of gratuitous pottery photos from the last glaze kiln. I just unloaded a bisque this week and I've been working on making plaster molds for some new ideas. The plaster is a nightmare though and I've had several mishaps with it setting too quickly or oozing out of the forms and going everywhere.

The best laid plans...and a look back in history

I had this plan to gently ease into gardening this year. I would go out for an hour or so and rake a bit here, tidy a bit there...
It started out OK. I pruned all the fruit trees in February.
I pruned all the shrubs in March.
Last weekend was sunny and warmish. I spent hours raking and weeding and edging and top dressing. Two days in a row. I can't move more than my fingers to type.
My small goal was to uncover the shade garden and check on the perennials there.
From there I branched out to raking up some branches in the drive and the lawn. But this is how my thought process became my undoing.
"But why rake branches until all the tree pruning is done?"
So I did that.
"And if I'm uncovering the rhubarb, shouldn't I just top dress it with fertilizer? But before I top dress, shouldn't I weed out the crab grass? But if I'm weeding crabgrass, shouldn't I give the bed a hard edge to stop the grass from re-invading the rhubarb? Since I have the edger out, shouldn't I do the same to the asparagus bed? And it has crabgrass too...."

Today I took it easy and simply loaded up the truck with branches to take to the compost site and I bought a new burn barrel. Our old burn barrel is rather rusted out and I have been meaning to replace it for two years, so one more item off the List with a capital L.
Why do we need a burn barrel? We don't much. When we were first here and doing a lot of house destruction, we burned a lot of the short and scrappy lumber we were removing from the house. This picture from 2005 illustrates how much we are talking about. This is one of my favourite pictures from that time. I went to visit a friend in Scotland, and when I came home, this is what my house looked like. The upstairs is missing, the diagonal line on the left of the picture is the upstairs bedroom wall, the lighter coloured square is where the dining room used to be.
This picture is about a month later with the shell of the new construction almost complete. We actually reclaimed a lot of the lumber you see piled here, either we saved the wood to be reused or we chopped it into short lengths and used it to heat the workshop.
We were doing so much that it would have been prohibitive to pay for dumping the mixed construction waste at the transfer station, and it is so far away that it took a lot of time to get there and back with a load on our little truck. When we started the destruction we had a dumpster for the initial debris and it was 100's of dollars. ouch.
Then I began to use the burn barrel to burn all the branches from spring clean up, but now I can take it for free to the compost site in town which is much closer than the county site.
We still have a lot of paper which I have been trying to burn in the wood stove all winter, but that creates a lot of ash that needs to be removed frequently. The paper is old bills, taxes from 1994 to 2000, files and files of stuff we don't need to hang on to any longer, boxes and boxes full. I have a shredder, but the volume would take ages to shred, just as the burning in the wood stove was taking ages, hence the new burn barrel.

The List - Part Two

Technology is conspiring against me as I attempt to do more of my List with a capital L.
I tried shortening my Frenchy's jeans, and the iron stopped working. This is not a new development, about 15 months ago the iron stopped working but I liked it so much I decided to have it fixed rather than buy one new. After waiting weeks for a diagnosis from the repair shop in the city that is only open M-F, 9 -5 therefore making it very difficult to get to, I was told by the useless repair guy that it worked perfectly and to come pick it up. To be fair, it does work perfectly for the first 7 minutes, and then it shuts off and will not turn back on until it sits there for at least a few hours. As long as you can iron something in 7 minutes there is no problem, and usually I can manage to speed iron anything I need, but not today. Happily, the iron I bought to go to University 24 years ago still works, so I did get the legs of my jeans hemmed. One more item checked off.
I tried making a new work belt to replace the one stolen last year. After cleaning the sewing machine, and locating the proper thread and needle, and changing the tension to work with the heavy duty nylon I began reverse engineering from memory the Caribiner holder only to find that it was a little more complicated than I expected. The sweetie informed me that there is a portfolio of patterns somewhere for all of those things he used to make, but after searching every box in the basement for an hour I gave up. I did find the 1960's warming tray that I could have used for his birthday party last month.
Having lost interest in the work belt, I tried using a CD to write my own Legal Will (because really, this has been on the list for several years now) only to find that the desk top computer will not read a CD any more. The desktop is 8, which in computer years is like 80, and the Sweetie has been wanting a new one for about a year or maybe two. It is slow. It does have memory issues (like most Octogenarians) and let's face it, the CD drive could have been broken for months, or even years because when was the last time I wanted to use a CD anyway? Perhaps the occasional dusting could have helped. I am still holding out on buying a new one because I know there is a property tax bill coming soon to my mailbox, and I spent my income tax refund on new tires for the truck. The simplest thing to do is buy a downloadable version of this and bypass the CD thing completely. But I am too cheap to buy a second version of a thing I already bought but can't use and so I am in limbo. Perhaps the dear Sweetie will let me use his laptop. If I die before I write my will, I will spare a thought for all of you left behind suffering under probate while I'm sipping my mead in Valhalla.
A few pictures of new pots. I'm in a texture stage these days. Last week I was rejected from a juried craft fair in the city. The rejection was a form letter, which stated several criteria which I may have failed to meet. I prefer to think that I was rejected because I was not a local resident rather than my pots are not good enough. The rejection was a relief as I was worried I wouldn't have enough wares stocked up, but that had the detrimental effect of slowing my production even further and now I find I'm back to the experimental stage instead of doing more of the same to get a good selection of similar things. I am a pottery flibbertigibbet.
Also last week I was accepted to a three day Christmas show at the end of October. Unfortunately the end of October is too far away to panic me into action. I fear I might need to start setting weekly goals for production or it is all going to go badly.
Here is a gratuitous cute dog photo.

Sunny and Freezing, I tackle the LIST

Almost the end of March. The spring equinox came and went without much fanfare. It has been colder this week and the mucky drive is drier and more solid, mostly because it is frozen again. Fooled by the sunshine I set out to prune the overgrown honeysuckles (Lonicera tartarica) and some other shrubs yesterday morning. The thermometer said Zero but I figured it would warm up with the sunshine. At noon I admitted defeat, half frozen from the north wind that made the day feel more like -14 'C. The rest of the garden work will have to wait for a milder day.
This is day two of fierce wind, and we are burning our way through the wood we bought last fall for next winter. This winter we easily burned 3 1/2 cords, almost double what we burned last year. This winter though it was cold in early October and it is still cold now. Where as last winter it was still warm in November and spring in February. Having said that, we burned 100 L less of oil in the furnace. A result of both of us being home much of the time and the wood stove being lit more than last year.
Last night we remembered to turn off the lights for Earth Hour. It was really dark and all we could to was sit by the fire and talk about the Federal Election. The sweetie is a political junky and is very excited about the election. I am already bored with the idea, especially knowing that for the next 36 days, I will have to endure him yelling sarcastic comments at the TV whenever Stephen Harper appears. We cancelled cable two weeks ago, and he is really missing the all news channels. We still have internet though, so he can watch much of what is going on that way. I have a friend who, when she gets exasperated at her DH for one of his many quirks, his response is to say "How can you complain? I could be an alcoholic, gambling wife beater?" With this in mind I try to remind myself that my situation could be worse, the Sweetie could watch sports.
The thought of being called back to work soon has spurred me to do some of those things on my List with a capital L, only to be thwarted by technology at every turn. You know the List, those things that take a back seat when you are busy, and when you have time you are so used to them that you forget they need attention.
Like the pepper grinder that probably hasn't worked well for two or three years now. Last week in an effort to get something out of it I tightened the top knob too much and cracked the top completely into two pieces. It went on the grocery list for two weeks before I remembered to pick one up.
Snazzy yes? It is a ceramic grinder and so far we are still over peppering as one small twist equals about 15 twists from the old grinder. Small victories.
The alarm clock was another victory. Shortly after we bought it 10 years ago I dropped it and the face plate came off and the radio didn't tune quite right so that when the radio alarm went off you could hear the beeping alarm in the back ground. Annoying yes, but only until you get up and then you promptly forgot about it (for a decade) Last week I dropped it again (it was a clumsy week last week) and the digital numbers stopped displaying properly. At one point the dear sweetie asked what time it was and I replied, "L 1 L." In my defence of this decade long apathy I will say that I tried to replace it last Christmas time, but when I got to the store I was overwhelmed at the choices and left after 15 minutes without purchasing anything. Did I want one alarm or two? Did I want it to project the time? Automatically update? Have a choice of noises? Have an ipod charger? What colour? This time I took the DS with me and he helped me through it, crisis averted.
And the thermometer. We have one outside the kitchen window to tell us what to wear in the morning. Except it is on the east side of the house and while it is very accurate after 10am, in the early morning while the sun is rising and while we are getting dressed, it lies. It increases the real temperature by several degrees. Note the jaunty angle from having fallen off the bracket every time there is an east wind. How can you trust such a thing? There have been many days I set out with only a t shirt when I should have been wearing a sweater and hat. So I purchased a new one, with the proper numbers larger than the others, and the DS put it outside the living room window on the north side for more accurate morning temperatures. The picture tells the the flaw in this plan. Take only 1 minute after the last picture, the temperature is 5 degrees higher on the north side of the house at supper time when the sun is setting and hits this spot! It amazes me that the sun comes that far around the house only a few days after the vernal equinox.
While not exactly on the List, last week I picked a dear friend up at the airport and as a thank you (or perhaps as a late birthday pressie) she gave me this beautifully quilted tea cosy. What a hoot!
And finally, gratuitous cute cat photo.