Holiday Cooking Failures

On the weekend, I actually mustered enough spirit to do some Christmas cooking. There are some standards that must be made every year, but the problem is of course that there are two of us, so the standards are different. (The nice thing about standards is there are so many of them.)
My favourite is frying pan cookies, his favourite is fruit balls. The good thing about Christmas cooking is that for everything the ingredients are pretty much the same but the method is different. Ingredients for dark fruit cake, (or war cake as we call it in this house) frying pan cookies and fruit balls are all the same, only in different amounts which make the trip to the bulk barn easier. Sugar, fat, eggs, dates, nuts, coconut, candied cherries and candied fruit are all you need to make anything at Christmas.
War cake is pretty easy, and I posted about it two years ago here. This year, I forgot to cover the outside of my breakaway bunt pan with tin foil, so the cake got mushy on the bottom inch as it sat cooking in water to keep it moist. Moist, yeah I'll say. The fix for that is I have a slightly shorter bunt cake than usual because I cut off the bottom and threw it in the compost.
Frying Pan cookies are also easy, because they don't get baked, just cooked in the pan and rolled in coconut. Yum.
Fruit balls are trickier apparently. This year was my first attempt. He usually makes them, as they are his mother's recipe. They have always turned out for him in the past so I was not forewarned. On Monday, while he went to Digby to pick up his parents from the Saint John Ferry, I got to work to make fruit balls as a surprise for them all. You mix all the stuff together in a bowl, add eggs and sugar, and drop them on a cookie sheet and into the oven. Easy right? The sugar and eggs are supposed to keep the chopped fruit and nuts together and they turn into sticky chewy blobs. It didn't work. They looked fine until I tried to remove them from the cookie sheet, and they fell apart into crumbled sticky fruit and nuts, they wouldn't stay as balls at all. It was at this time they all arrived home to witness my complete failure. That's when his mum told me she couldn't get them to work either most times. She blamed the egg being too runny, I blamed the dates being too hard.
I thought I could salvage the failure by taking the crumbs and using it as topping for a holiday pear crisp. Good idea, but bad execution. I had some already sliced pears in the freezer that we harvested from our tree out back this fall. I threw them in a pan, threw the topping on top and popped it all in the oven. I think, it would have worked better if the pears weren't frozen. What we got was a very watery, mushy pear soup on the bottom with sticky chewy nuts and fruit on top. It tasted Ok once it was drained with a slotted spoon, but there were a lot of leftovers that went into the compost bin.

Flashback Fridays

Tis the season to have flashbacks to all those holiday and special events related trauma. Last weekend I went to the city for some shopping and lunch to celebrate Jane Austen's 234 birthday. I was in a well known shoe store buying my mother's Christmas present to me (thanks Mom, they're beautiful, how did you know?) The salesman turned out to be a fellow sufferer of the dreaded Piano Recital from way back. He wasn't exactly a friend, as he is between my sister's age and mine, but he was a constant for those years.
The very next day, I received a video of a friends son's first piano recital in my email box. Suddenly, as I listened to his unique tempo of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star I had the vivid recollection of buying a new dress especially for the piano recital. I hated wearing dresses as a child and it was probably very difficult to get me to try one one, let alone be excited about it. Usually this item was a hand-me-down, hand-me-down from my sister via our cousin, but apparently this year were were going to splash out. Or perhaps I finally caught up to my cousin and by the time her hand-me-downs were ready I had already outgrown them. At any rate I remember it as the most uncomfortable piece of clothing I have ever worn, it was a stone coloured pinafore I think, although it was probably called a jumper, or maybe a tunic. I remember it made it extremely difficult to slide down the banister of the church hall while I was waiting for the audience to be seated before the show. I don't remember anything about any of the pieces I ever played at any of the recitals, but I do remember practising my curtsy. Similarly, I don't remember how to play the piano anymore, but I'm a kick ass curtsier.

But wait, there's more:
After that wave of neurotic nostalgia, a friend posted on her blog about her children's Christmas concert that was held last week. (Yes, they still call them Christmas concerts here in monocultural Nova Scotia.) This brought on another wave of Christmas concert flashbacks for me to endure. Unlike the piano performances, I can remember a lot about the concerts from my elementary school days. I remember one year I was a Raggedy Ann doll, along with 4 other identical Raggedy Ann Dolls (but I was the one in the middle, and so therefore the most important.) Raggedy Ann was the Uber popular doll that year in the Sears Catalogue. We sang a song and did a Raggedy dance that consisted of lurching back and forth from foot to foot while letting your arms swing about all flopsie like to the tempo of the song. I designed the movement in rehearsal and it stuck, my first stab at choreography. On the night, I got off on the wrong foot, literally. I must have started on the left while the others started on the right, meaning I lurched one way while they all lurched the other. I was concentrating so hard that I failed to notice, but the laughter of the audience spurred me on to lurch wider and wider, thinking that they were really enjoying our performance. (unlike poor JaySee Gee 's traumatic laughter comment on the blog post link above) My exuberant lurching made my shoulders bump the poor girls shoulders on either side and send them flying back off balance the other way. I was completely oblivious to anything but the positive response we were getting until we were off stage and they all told me off.
I can imagine the next week or so will have it's share of flashback joy as we get closer to the tree trimming holiday.

Coil pitchers

Last spring I made three coil pitchers for fun and then the summer pottery hiatus meant they languished on the shelf until last week, when I finally finished them. That is to say I finished two of the three, the smallest one was knocked off the shelf by a cat and plunged to its death in August or September. No great loss really. I decided to play around with under-glaze to finish the other two, so the red and green tops are painted on the bisque, and then clear glaze applied to the whole thing inside and out. Even though I put two layers of clear glaze on the inside and outside, I find that water still leaches through the bottom where there is no glaze on the outside. It may be because they are coil constructed pots, but I think it is more likely the result of under firing the glaze. I made other water tight pots by the coil method before, I have two functional tea pots made this way, and I don't actually coil the bottom, but I use a slab bottom so it should be leak proof. I know I under fired these pots, because I couldn't see the witness cone very well inside the kiln as it was firing, and as I had over fired the previous kiln, when the temperature reached 2160, I left it for 10 minutes and then shut it down. I thought I could see that the cone had dropped, but I was mistaken, the cone 5 was just starting to bend. These are made of my speckled clay, but they are not as speckled as some other things I have, and this may be another result of under firing too.
The seeping water is really very little, and I wouldn't notice it except I left the green pitcher full of water on the studio table that is covered in canvas and when I went to move it is was damp underneath. The red pitcher is on the wood stove to add moisture to air. Last year we used a crock pot from China Town for this, and it eventually marked the stove with rust where it leached too. Eventually I may get around to re-glazing and re-firing these pots to see if that makes the difference.

Glaze Test Results

Today we got the first snow. It is wet and was preceded by much rain and I don't think it will be here long, but it was a shock to the system after the long mild fall to realize that winter is really here now. How is it that every year I get caught out by it? I saw the leaves falling off the trees. I have had to scrape frost off the car windows a couple mornings. The heat came on last week during the night. Northern New Brunswick and Alberta have already had snow. Still, I refused to believe the weather network when they announced we would get a nor'easter today. Hmmm. It might be time to see if the snowblower will start.
Last week I did some glaze tests to see how I should glaze the plant pot for my friend David. It was very exciting to open that kiln and see what I got. Friday I glazed the pot itself. It's funny but test tiles never really seem to tell the whole story. It is like the paint chip never really shows what the room will look like. These are a couple samples of what I got when I tested some colours. The middle colour of the three is what I used for the pot, and the second tile picture is that glaze over some other colours. My test tiles are relief tiles that we made for the shower, and the relief creates breaks in the glaze colours, which can be quite interesting, but if the surface being glazed is smooth, the colours can be quite different. The glaze didn't break up as much on the pot itself, so the finished surface is quite a bit darker than I expected. You can see how the rim coils make the glaze break, but the leaf imprints weren't enough to affect it. It still interesting because there is a rich sheen to the mat finish under bright light, but in a dark room that gets lost and it is just a dark pot and rather dull. If this were a plate or a mug, I'd run it though the dishwasher two dozen times and know it would get more interesting as the surface wears a bit, but I don't imagine it will be subjected to that sort of daily abuse as a plant pot.
Today I'm firing another glaze kiln with some butter dishes I made last spring. I started making some Christmas presents this week, (nothing like getting started early!) and those butter dishes were just taking up room on the shelf. The bonus of pushing work through is that I may actually have a functional butter dish to use when Peter's parents arrive for their visit.

No Comment

I am experiencing a technology hiccough (this is how to spell hiccup apparently). All your comments seem to have disappeared. It's not that I don't love you. I love you all. All three of you. But today my blog got a spam comment and in trying to erase it, I think I erased everything. Blogger tells me this isn't the case, but the comments are gone. Sorry.
Now you will find that you have to type in a wiggly word from the box in order to post, you know the drill, so that should get rid of the spammers.

Almost there

Last week, (was it just last week?) we finished tiling the 4th shower wall around the door. It took hours because there was only 1 full tile per row, and all the others had to be cut.
We also laid the floor, which went super fast because the hex tiles are in 2 ft square sheets all connected together, and we only had to cut out the hole for the drain and cut the sheets to fit the space.
Today we grouted the walls. That took about an hour to put it all on, and another half hour to take it all off. It was a lot of hard work too, and while I sweep at lot in curling so my arms are at least used to the abuse, the Other One is getting a little soft while he spends most days only exercising his brain. I'm thinking tomorrow he will be pretty sore when we have to grout the floor. We decide to use bright white grout between the tiles hoping that white on white would hide all the imperfections of the tile job, and I think it worked. The corners on the edge of the first wall we tiled gapped 3/8th of an inch because we really didn't know what we were doing. And the blue tile didn't cut so well on the stone saw, so there were nicks and chips in the glaze edge. The grout really did fill a lot of that in, so it looks pretty spiffy I think.
After a few days of letting it set up we will seal it all. We are not going to install the door or window yet, we plan to cover them with a shower curtain because our goal was to be able to have a shower before Christmas while the parents are visiting.

I live in a cathouse...that can't be right.

It has been a house of revolving cats. Poor Willow is confused about who really lives here I think.










After Atticus died, my sister visited for her birthday and brought Lester. (He didn't know how to play nice and frightened poor Willow so such she peed on the floor.)







After he left, our friend Claude came for a visit. (He' s very well behaved)








After he left, we picked New Cat 2 up at the shelter on Monday. We haven't settled on a name yet. The last one took several months. She is so obese I've taken to calling her Beach Ball. We may make it Bea or Beatrice permanently (it has the bonus of being a Shakespearean character)
We've also tried Jupiter (for her mass)
Hooty (for the yellow eyes)
Lydia (the eyes make her look stunned)
Cordelia (to go with Willow; also Shakespearean)
Many other trees, both English and Latin.
I asked Willow what she thought, and she suggested Yum Yum.
Nothing so far has stuck.
Now Claude is back for the weekend. (And sitting on my lap as I type)

Any suggestions will be considered.

Test Tiles

This is a picture of my hard working little kiln. The inside dimensions are about 2 cubic feet. It is sold as a test kiln or jewelry kiln for doing pewter or glass. 2 cubic feet doesn't hold a lot, on this day it was holding 1 pot. The thing I like about this picture is that you can see the front wheel of my motorcycle reflected in the side.The bisque firing of the plant pot turned out well on Sunday, by well I mean the pot didn't crack.

My temperature gauge ( the box hanging off the side there) wasn't working properly for the first three hours. The Other One fixed it by cleaning the contacts on the wires. And I couldn't see the cone in the kiln because the pot was behind it and was glowing at the same temperature (of course). I usually try to leave a clear space behind the cone, so that the elements on the other side of the kiln outline it, and I can see it bend. The pot itself just fits inside the kiln with only and inch around the circumference so it completely blocked the brighter glow of the elements. Consequently I over-fired the kiln a bit. The (now working) temperature gauge read about 15 degrees hotter than 1860 for about 30 minutes. Not sure how this will affect the final result.
Today I made test tiles of various glazes I mixed up. I don't custom make my own glazes because I don't have enough room in my teeny studio to keep all the chemical ingredients that go into glazes. And let's face it I don't really know what I'm doing most of the time and this is one bit of the process I can experiment with later. So mixing up glazes for me means opening the pre-mixed bag of ingredients from the supplier and adding water. It does take a long time though because I have to sieve it through a very fine mesh to get the lumps out. I mixed up a mossy green, a speckled cinnamon that looks more like oatmeal to me, and a clear glaze today. The dark blue I already had mixed earlier for the bathroom tiles. The reason there are so many more tiles in the picture, is that you can combine different colours in layers for different effects, and blue on green will look different than green on blue. You may notice that none of these tiles look like they are green or blue, but after they are fired they go a completely different colour. All with the magic of chemistry I don't begin to understand. Also, I have 2 different clay bodies that I use, and the glazes will look different on them, so essentially 4 colours turns into many possible combinations. I also have some underglaze paint like they use at those paint your own pottery places, so some of the glazes are used with them underneath, just in case it turns out interesting. I suck at underglazing, but if you want to see a delicious version, check out Lucky Rabbit Pottery from Annapolis Royal.
Here is a close up of the plant pot as it came out of the bisque firing. You can just barely see the fine imprint of leaves on the surface. They may not show up at all when it is finished.

Slow Sunday

Firing the kiln today for the first time since May. How many potters need to move two motorcycles and a golf cart to fire their kiln I wonder?
We are moving forward, though, with getting larger kilns operational. Yesterday the electrician was here to prepare for getting a new 200 amp service to the house. Currently (no pun intended) we have a 100 amp service with 60 amps going to the garage/barn/workshop/kiln room. Good enough to fire the small test kiln but not quite enough for the other two.
I went to the designer craft show in Halifax yesterday while the other one stayed at home with the electrician. Lots of potters there, ...and glass makers, jewelry artists, knitters, felters, silk makers and wood workers. One potter I spoke to did wood firing. Her 30 hour marathon of stoking a wood kiln makes my 12 hour -check it occasionally- electric one seem so easy. We have loads of room in the back yard to build a brick kiln and give it a try, but I think I will stick with the electric for a while yet.
Last weekend we began working on the shower again, because both the Other Ones parents are visiting for Christmas. We had to put drywall on the outside wall of the door to be able to bring the tile around the door opening, and that required us also drywalling the ceiling. That required that we strap the ceiling to hang the drywall on. That required that we take the temporary shower curtain down. There always seems to be three steps back to one step forward. We should be working on the tiling again today, but I have a test to make for my class tomorrow.
It is harder and takes longer to make a test than it does to take one. Given the choice I think I would rather have to clean up the mess of tiling than make a test about irrigation and lighting in a greenhouse. I'm sure that would be my students choice too, but these things must be done.

Just Potty

Today. I finally got back into the studio after a too long absence. The lovely weather conspired against me. It has been a beautiful fall here for the last two weeks or more, the temperatures were 12-16 degrees and usually sunny with very little breeze. Beautiful gardening weather in fact, and that was what I was concentrating on. The garlic is planted, the asparagus weeded and mulched. I even managed to re putty the windows in the greenhouse. All the leaves were mulched with the mower and piled onto the compost heap to rot, and the butternuts are in piles waiting for more room in the green bin. If I put those in the compost pile they germinate and I have dozens of trees to weed out in the spring.
Today the weather began to be more Novemberish and we made a fire for the first time in days. The new insulated back door and porch really help to keep the heat in and the draughts out, so lately there wasn't even a need for a fire in the evenings. As I type, I'm roasting at 25 degrees!
I woke up this morning knowing I really needed to get going on a pottery project that has been on the back burner for about 5 weeks. I had one day, two weeks ago when the weather was cold and damp that I started to make a plant pot for a friend. He requested it ages ago, to give to his wife for Christmas. At the time I thought, 'no problem', but after 8 months of no pottery, I'm a little rusty.
Because it it quite large, and I haven't thrown anything since March, I thought I would make a coil pot. (Plus I love making coil pots, they are fun and easy to clean up.) My first attempt two weeks ago, started out well, but at about the half way mark I realized it had become so wide that it wouldn't fit in my little kiln. Oops. This is a picture of it before it was smooshed. The plant sitting in it is for scale, it is a standard 8" wide plant pot.
Also, I felt the walls were a little thin for the size of pot I was making. I thought I was using a 1/2 inch hole to extrude the coils, so I found a 3/4 inch drill bit and made a new template. The second attempt with the larger coil made the walls too thick. That was when I realised the first hole was only a 3/8th inch, so I found a 1/2 inch drill bit and made yet another template. Truly, I think 5/8th would be best, but by this time I'm a little annoyed at myself and just want to get on with making the d@r* pot! I managed to get 3/4 of the work done on the next attempt, and then stopped for the day.
That was two weeks ago. Today I finished constructing the pot and decorated it by imprinting some leaves that I picked up while walking the dog. Some of the leaves were dried up after laying around on a shelf for so long. I soaked them in water and put them in the microwave to make them more pliable so they would stick better as I pressed them into the surface. The idea, is that the leaves will burn up in the kiln, but their vein imprint will remain in the clay. The imprint will hopefully catch some of the glaze and give the pot some texture.
I also made some extruded test tiles of the same clay body to use for glaze tests to see which colours look good on this clay. If all goes well, my friend will have his Christmas pressie in time. Fingers crossed.
Just for the fun of it, I also tried throwing today. It is not really like riding a bike, you do forget. I found I was making all the old mistakes I thought I had corrected, and I had to relearn all the techniques that I once knew before my attempts at cylinders started to take shape again.
If I keep at it, I may have something made for my own Christmas presents. Here's hoping the weather stays cold and damp!

Atticat

If you tuned in for a bit of a laugh today, sorry.

I've been avoiding posting for the last week, because last Monday Nov 2, Atticus was hit by a car at the end of the driveway and died. Even a week later, I can't believe how hard that is to type.

I am also surprised at how much we miss him. He was mostly just small, and quiet, and there. (Unless you were a small animal, in which case he was a terrorist. But even terrorists have people that love them.) We buried him in the back yard under a walnut tree with his catnip mouse in his paws. He was a most excellent creature.

Maybe tomorrow I can be funnier.

Psst. Wanna Buya Golf Cart?

For reasons too complex to explain, I am selling a golf cart. It is a 1986 Columbia model gas powered engine with oil injection (no mixing gas). One cylinder, 243 c.c. Columbia is a subsidiary of Harley Davidson, so my golf cart is a Hog.
It Runs well, has a new battery and spark plug and a hard shell canopy. I would like $800, but will consider trades, such as:



Antique Wingback Armchairs
Rain Barrels with lids
Antique kitchen hutch
Maple Hardwood suitable for cabinets
Slate flagstone suitable for patios
Cedar Hedging suitable for blocking annoying neighbours
Any reasonable combination of the above.

I Blame Jane (AISSBH)

Last Thursday evening I attended my first Jane Austen Society meeting. The Jane Austen Society of North America is a society of people that love to get together and discuss all things Jane Austen. Her books, her biography and any academic nuance that someone can think of and research. I was the recipient of a membership because my DS bought one this summer. It was a pleasant surprise when I received my handwritten membership letter from the society secretary and she told me the local chapter would be in touch. Mostly, the local chapter is comprised of English profs and retired English profs. The meeting was at a member's house on the NW Arm off Purcell's Cove and just finding it was an adventure, but we arrived in good time despite traffic delays and a useless google map.
Some of the regular members had just returned from the national AGM in Philadelphia, and they reported on what they saw before we listened to a paper that one of them had presented there. It was research on a brother of Jane Austen who as a Captain in the Royal Navy was stationed here in Halifax. She drew parallels between his life and his wife and the characters of Capt. Wentworth and Mrs Croft in Pursuasion.
It was an interesting evening, with great food to boot, and I'm looking forward to December 16, when we all meet again for Jane's Birthday lunch. (She probably won't be there, unless she's a Zombie.)
I Blame Jane (AISSBH)

Fun Field Day

I spent the day in Halifax today at a workshop information session about carpet bedding. The HRM gardeners were nice enough to invite us to attend when we expressed an interest in trying some out next year in Wolfville. Carpet bedding is something I have never had the opportunity to try, but I love the idea of creating pictures in plants and the folks at the Halifax Public Gardens and the Halifax Bridge Commission are pretty good at it.
Carpet bedding fell out of favour decades ago when the more natural looking (and way less time consuming) styles became popular but it was still all the rage when the public gardens were first designed, and they have stuck with the Victorian/Edwardian style throughout. Larger cities have often done carpet bedding designs but recently the Montreal Mosaiculture festival began in 2000, has really given this old fashioned style a popularity boost, not to mention a third dimention. I think we will start much smaller and more simple if we are to attempt this next season, but it is fun to look at the pictures for inspiration anyway.

And About Time

That back door installation that we started the weekend before Thanksgiving is nearly complete. I guess my subtle hints about the cold draughts coming from the huge holes around the temporary plywood cover finally spurred the Other One into action yesterday. We removed the plywood and rebuilt the wall properly where the old door frame had been. So now there is actual structure holding up the roof of the porch (wow, what a concept) and also insulation stopping those draughts.
Renovating an old house sometimes means you have to go with the flow when meshing the old with the new, and we had put down the second layer of sub floor to put the new door on long before we built the wall that replaced the old door. (We have a double layer of sub floor so that the height of the finished floor will match the original floors in the adjoining room.) We left a space to put the sill plate for the new wall on the first layer of sub floor, but the porch isn't exactly square and the space we left was too narrow for the 2 x 4. We ended up cutting a groove in the sill plate to accommodate the edge of the second layer of sub floor at one corner. In years to come, when the next renovators tear that wall out (probably to put a door there) they will wonder what those idiots were thinking when they built this wall.
This is something that I think about a lot. We constantly roll our eyes at the stupid things we find hidden in the walls of our old house. Scary electrical, holes drilled through support beams for plumbing, rotting sills just covered over instead of replaced, the list is endless. But I have no doubt that future owners will do the same with our attempts. I'm thinking about this today because my Dear Sister sent me a link to Yarn Harlot who is having renovation nightmares of her own.
Just a little foil vapour barrier and strapping and the porch will resemble the rest of the house. It's important to have a overall interior design concept that flows. Our only negative to new porch wall is poor Atticus can't figure out what happened to that door that used to be right there. This morning he was pondering the new wall and seemed to want to attack the fibreglass blocking his egress when the Other One demonstrated the new door. I wonder if his cat brain equates the moving doors in this house withthe moving staircases at Hogwarts.

The Truth About Cats and Dogs

Day 6 of unemployment. Well sort of. The Community College did not go on strike so I still have classes to prep for and teach. Which means that today seems to be the first free time day in nearly a week where I get to do what I want.
As always I have a list of things to do that include cleaning up and organizing the studio and the greenhouse after months of ignoring those chores. There are still garden remains to deal with too. I'm not even going to think about the disaster zone in the garage.
Willow is settling in nicely, she is still a little reserved and we are trying hard to make her more out going and silly. Unlike Jake, she is very difficult to wind up, almost impossible in the house. Which I know is a good thing but we like our dog to be the zany entertainment and so far she continues to be a calm well mannered young lady. WTF?
We were warned that she didn't get along with the other dog at her other home, but she has met three friend's dogs so far and acted very well. We did a Sunday walk with friends and their dog, and we all got along fine until the end. They got into a scuffle but it was probably more traumatizing for the people than it was for the dogs who seemed fine moments later. We were also warned she can sometimes be incontinent as a result of her being spayed. She did have an accident yesterday and seemed mortified when she realized, so we are researching ways to help this.
Atticus has the tendency to eat too quickly and then barf up his food. So we have a barfing cat and a peeing dog. (Atticus, however, never appears embarrassed by his accidents, and the problem is mostly solved by putting a ping pong ball in his food to stop him gobbling it so fast.)
Perversely I like Willow more for this flaw than when I though she was a perfect well behaved dog. Let's face it, a well behaved Golden Retriever is just too suburban middle class for me. It also appears I am allergic to her, so this of course adds to her appeal.

Meet Willow

This is Willow, our newest family member. She is a lovely three year old Golden retriever that we adopted this week from a family on the south shore, who happily for us could not keep her anymore.
She is very well behaved but I'm sure after a week or so with us she will learn many bad habits.
Atticus is not completely sure about this new addition, but so far they each seem ok with the other.

Have Tools, Will Travel

We are off to the parents abode this weekend for excessive turkey and cranberries. We are going early to be able to build a set of outside steps for them. The old steps were decommissioned early this spring as they were deemed unsafe I guess, due to their rotten nature. They were replaced by and old kitchen step stool, because a small, steep, tippy step stool is much better for a pair of 85 year olds to walk on than rotting steps. We tried to build steps in August when we were home but were not allowed because there was a handyman coming to do it. Or something. But the handyman never arrived, or something, so now we are allowed to build proper steps.
Not getting much of an early start today as a result of the excessive eating and drinking last night with friends. Looks like it is shaping up to be an excessive Thanksgiving.
Well, thank the gods for that.

Back Door Bonanza

We are both exhausted after a marathon weekend project. One task on our to do list for quite some time was to replace the back door, which has been rotting out the floor beneath for at least as long as we have been living here.
We suspected that once we had a look at the floor, we would have a big job to replace anything rotten. We had no idea of what was below the floor, but evidence from outside suggested it was once a squirrels nest. In addition, we wanted to move the location of the door from the south wall of the porch to the east wall. The south wall is directly below the roof valley, and the ice builds up on the step making it really treacherous in winter. This was also why the door would leak when it rained.

We began Saturday morning, tearing up several layers of linoleum, chip board, 50's era tile and oil cloth to get to the real sub floor. Once we tore out the door we could see the rot extended back a foot or so from the door and also affected the sill. We decided to take out both layers of floor. The top was 1x4 tongue and groove, below that was a dogs breakfast of boards scavenged from what looked like the chicken coop.
Happily the joists were good, and the other sills were still good so we replaced the sill under the old door, and used plywood to cover the hole in the wall where the old door came out. That wall will eventually be the coat closet.
This morning we dug out the rubble under the construction. In the midst of this, we found an old green bottle, similar to a 70's era 7up bottle but without any writing on it, and a child's shoe. We levelled out the dirt and put vapour barrier over it to help seal out the damp. Then we insulated between the joists with styrofoam and fibreglass and laid plywood on top for the sub floor.
Next came the task of making a new hole for the new door. Once we opened up the east wall and exposed the studs we could see that the original door was probably there to begin with. The gable wall of the porch is constructed with a double top plate so we can use that as a header for the new door. When we insulated the porch walls a few years ago, we added studs in the right place for the door opening that we knew would eventually be there. After measuring to make sure we knew what size we wanted we went out to buy the door. By this time it was raining, so we put a plastic tent over the outside and continued to plug away. A skill saw and a reciprocating saw makes short work of several layers of sheathing and shingles.
Finally, we slotted the new door into place. It is a temporary measure so the squirrels don't come in tonight. The rough opening is a bit tight, and needs a slight adjustment before we fix it there permanently.
There is still a lot to do on this project. We need to add a bottom plate and studs in the old door opening, and replace the outside house wrap and shingles to make it weather proof. We need to finish laying the sub floor and build a set of steps up to the new door. Oh yeah, and the door needs a doorknob too.

Canning is the New Knitting

Last week, I heard on the radio that canning was the new knitting. The idea is that people can continue to eat locally during the winter if they preserve the harvest now. My mother would say everything old is new again.
Being a country girl, I've always been into canning because I was spoiled as a child with home made everything and the store bought versions were never as good. So years ago I started with jam and sweet fruit preserves. The other one loves pickles, so pickles were my next attempt. I used to spend weeks in the fall preserving everything I could get mt hands on that I could do in a hot water canner. My intentions were good but invariably we never ate all of it, and after a few years of dusting jars full of suspect stuff that eventually got thrown away, I gave up most of it and just stayed with the staples.
I'm not so fond of pickles and making them is a lot of work, so I don't do as many of those as he would like. The picture above is a small batch of green tomato chow, because we have a lot of green tomatoes and both the O.O and his father like them.
Salsa is one of those things that I can't stand if bought in a store. It just tastes like chemicals to me, but we eat a lot of Mexican food, and homemade salsa is a staple now. For a couple of years I've attempted to plant everything in the vegetable garden that one needs to make Salsa, but no matter how much I plan, the plants don't seem to co-operate. This year I got enough green peppers, about 2 weeks earlier than any tomatoes ripened. We got cold weather in early September which threatened frost, so I picked the bulk of my tomatoes while they were still green and packed them up in boxes to ripen later. None of my hot peppers grew at all. I couldn't find cilantro to plant at all this spring and my onions are just about ready to be picked now, although they are very small. So once again I went to the farm market and bought the ingredients I needed to make salsa and spent all day yesterday in the kitchen.
The other one, meanwhile finished off roofing the garden shed with the help of our neighbour Dan. This will keep the floor from rotting out again, and will also keep the new lawn mower dry in the winter.









Today he is working on replacing the sheathing on one end of the garage in a vain attempt to keep the critters out. Again, we are doing this a cheaply as possible because we want to tear the ugly garage down someday, so instead of using something proper, we are slapping up something call super roof, which seems to be half inch chip board, but not chip board.

Homely Renovations R Us

Now that Study Boy has emerged from writing the first draft of his research proposal, we spent some time doing house reno stuff yesterday. The never ending process of putting the actual house back together was temporarily suspended though because regular maintenance was required on the garage. It is disheartening to spend money and time on such an ugly building. We have future plans to tear the existing garage down and build a new one because it is:
1 ugly
2 in the view
3 falling down anyway
4 badly designed for our needs

But until we build a new one that corrects all these faults, we still need a place to store tools, motorcycles, kilns and building materials. Oh, and the car in winter. The roof has leaked for a while, and we tried to ignore it but it started leaking on things like the table saw and the chop saw and it really wasn't going to survive another winter. We thought that maybe we would just cover it in a tarp, but realistically, this building will be standing for at least another 3 years, but probably more like 5 or 6. Sigh.
So Study Boy morphed into Good Ol' Boy and visited the local hardware store to see if he could strike a deal on some cheap, roofing shingles. The staff at the local Timbermart know us by name, so when we appear and ask if they have any open or leftover bits and pieces they want to get rid of, they are usually pretty happy to sell it to us at a good price just to get rid of it.
Compared to the shingles we put on the house a couple of years ago, these are really thin and seem to lose a lot of asphalt while you are handling them. They are meant to be 15 year shingles, but they won't last 10. Fine for a building that (hopefully) will be gone in half that time.
With all the money he saved on shingles, Tool Boy bought a roofing gun on Ebay. When we shingled the house roof, we borrowed one from a neighbour who has since moved away, so we justified the expense by saying that we have friends that need roofing projects done this fall. What goes around, comes around.

Death and Literature

This is the Death of Rats. He (she?) is one of my favourite literary characters from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.

On the disc, Death is a character that shows up wherever there is, well, death. Which, like in our world, is pretty much everywhere, all the time. He is the standard Anthropomorphic Personification of death, which is to say, he looks like a skeleton, wearing a black robe and carrying a scythe.

Since he is so busy, it stands to reason that he needs an assistant. So the Death of Rats takes care of ushering smaller souls into the afterlife. Not just rats, but mice, small mammals, insects, you get the idea. And like the bigger Death, he is a rat skeleton wearing a robe and carrying a scythe. Because standards are important.


This is Atticus, named for a literary character. When we named him after the protagonist in "To Kill Mockingbird" we didn't expect he would take the title so literally.
Like the Death of Rats, he has decided it is his job to help usher smaller souls into the afterlife. At first it was a few house mice, then field mice, then several squirrels, a vole, a chipmunk, a bat, countless crickets and spiders and just today, 2 birds.
I love my cat, but he is starting to scare me.

Because I Don't Have Enough to Do...

Yeah right. Honestly I've been looking forward to getting laid off in October for about a month now; I want to do more pottery, rearrange elements of the garden before winter, do some smallish home reno projects and start curling. That was my plan for the fall. But Robbie Burns knew about the best laid plans. Today I agreed to teach a course at the community college. Just 1, and only 4 hours a week. It starts tomorrow. Actually it started Monday. Last minute and under the gun, just how I like to work.
I don't have a course outline or a semester schedule. I probably won't have access to a computer account or email tomorrow, and I haven't done any paperwork about being paid yet either. I have taught the course before, so I've decided to wing it tomorrow. I figure I can probably muster a 2 hour introduction to Horticulture Structures and Environment off the top of my head.
When I say wing it, I mean I have typed up 3 pages of outline stuff I may talk about. Or maybe not.
I expect something of my fall plans will suffer, most likely the garden.
Oh yeah, and I'm still working. What was I thinking?

Catching Up

Seems like the end of summer is coming whether we want it to or not. Everybody has been commenting on the shorter evenings and later mornings.

This morning the temperature said 3 degrees Celsius when I was getting dressed to ride the bike to work. I had to dig out the wind breaker pants, and as always, I wondered just what 3 degrees with a 80km/h wind actually makes the wind chill. I think the non technical answer is Brrrr. But now I need wonder no more, because this is a website that can calculate that. The technical answer is -14.7 degrees, way colder than I thought!

Tonight there is a large frost warning for most of the province. So I was out tonight covering the tomatoes and basil with bedsheets just in case. One can never have too many bedsheets. These ones came from Frenchies (my favourite store) and they are used as drop sheets when we do messy work in the house, and have also taken the place of walls when visitors need privacy for stuff like showering and peeing. (Oh those crazy visitors!) Tonight bedsheets are frost protection.
Before I covered everything I picked what was ripe. I never seem to remember that I don't need that many tomato plants. This year I thought I did well to keep it to a mere 10, or 2 each of 5 varieties. But as you can see, even just two, is too many for the cherry types. I remember one year in Vancouver I resorted to making green chow with cherry tomatoes, I may need to do this again.

Last Monday I went to the city to see a play at the Fringe Fest. It was called Audacious Babe and Glow Girl and it was written and performed by a friend and student in Acadia's Theatre programme. I thought it was awesome. That is my completely unbiased opinion. The theatre review in today's Chronically Horrid wasn't as positive as my completely unbiased opinion, but happily they didn't post it on the website so you don't have to read that trash.




For those of you wondering what the O.O. is up to, he is still chained to the computer trying to get his research proposal ready to send to his advisers, and consequently is still not allowed to have any fun at all until he finishes his homework. On a positive side, Atticus has decided to help.

And Finally, a long while back I mentioned to a potter friend that I follow a number of Pottery Blogs as a poor substitute for the feedback and ideas you get from being part of a community studio. She asked that I list them on my blog, so here they are added to the left pane. Each of these also have more potter's blogs listed on their site so I can pretty much get lost in virtual clay all evening.

We're Jammin'

This weekend I found myself with the unusual circumstance of not having anything to do. No social commitments, no house reno planned, no plans already made at all. And with the tail end of a tropical storm bearing down on us, I knew I wouldn't be gardening or going for a spin on the bike.
I may have mentioned that strawberry season is my favourite time of year. My love of strawberries is easily surpassed by how much the Other One adores blackberries.
With the O.O. locked in his room until his school work is done, I decided to reward his efforts by making him some blackberry jam. Off I went this morning to my not so secret spot down by the railroad tracks, just as the rain began to fall. It has been three years since I was last there. Last year and the year before, we were in Newfoundland. (AKA no berries to be found land.)
The berries were still there but they were smaller than I remembered, and pretty picked over already in most spots. Since I was last there, a proper walking trail has been put in beside the tracks, and I think more people walk there now. CN used to be pretty unhappy when people would use the train tracks as a trail, so they gave people a place to walk, just about a year before the last train stopped running. It took me nearly three hours to pick a scant five pints. It rained lightly, but I got soaked through, wading deep into the thickets looking for bigger berries. Finally I figured I had enough for a batch.
The bad thing about blackberries, aside from the thorns and the wasps, is that you have to sieve out the seeds and so you need to pick a lot more of them than say, strawberries. (Mmmmm, strawberries.) Happily, the O.O. likes jam more than jelly, (or at least so he tells me) and I don't have to get rid of all the seeds, which would be too tedious. When I was a teenager with braces, my Aunt Erica use to make me blackberry jelly. Now I know that there is just nothing I can do to make it up to her.
The jam making took most of the afternoon. Usually I double or quadruple a batch to save time. The directions on the pectin packaging warn against this, but I like to live on the edge. Except this year, none of my strawberry jams set up properly. I was blaming watery berries from all the early rain we got, but to be on the safe side I decided to follow directions this time. I forgot to put in the pectin in the first batch before I started to bottle it. Then I had to reboil the jam and re wash and sterilize the jars so I could add it. This slowed the process down a bit.
Then I had the brilliant idea to try and save the seeds I had sieved out so I could plant them and have my own berry patch. The O.O. was really excited by this idea and so we began. We washed and we washed and we washed and we washed. And lots of pulpy gunk came off the seeds, but at the end of 20 minutes, they were still pretty pulpy. I was concerned that they would go moldy before they germinated, so we tried a different tactic. We smooshed them out onto newspaper to dry them. My theory is that the pulp will brush off easier if it is dry. Once the seed is clean, we can stratify it in the fridge and sow it in a cold frame to germinate in spring. All in all, I had about 4 cups of pulp, which probably translates into thousands of seeds, so even if the germination rate is really low, I should get a few plants growing in the spring to plant out. It's a start.

A Play 's the Thing

What thing, though, I am not exactly sure. Last weekend we went over to the other side, to visit the parental units and see a play at the Ship's Co. This year was the 25th Anniversary of Ship's Co, and as the other one and I met there (everybody go awwwwwe) we should have attended all the events ( or at least some of the events) during the season, but we didn't. We do remember the 10th anniversary though; I think we worked it in fact.
Guilt finally caught up with me and we did arrange to see the second mainstage production aptly named Ferry Tales. It was commissioned to celebrate this year's anniversary, and was a collection of stories around and about the Minas Basin as told by passengers aboard the MV Kipawo when she was still a ferry travelling between Kingsport, Parrsboro and Wolfville and long before she was a theatre dry docked in Parrsboro. Most of the stories I had heard before, growing up on the Minas Basin. How Glooscap made the Five Islands. The story of a Bishop from Greenwich who hopped across the ice cakes one winter to ask his Parrsboro girl to marry him. The ghost story about the cave at Black Rock where you can still hear the woman abandoned by pirates, crying for help as the tide comes in and drowns her. (everybody go oooooh!)
It was fun, but a little disjointed, and I wonder if a tourist would be able to follow the narrative as it was just loosely strung together with a little music and comedy. The acting was very good. The set design worked well, although, there was a time when the MV Kipawo could have, (and would have) been used to play herself. Alas she is reduced to being a lobby for a black box stage. The costumes were confusing, and seemed to say 70's Britain more than 1930's Nova Scotia. They had that distinct low budget Frenchy's feel. Not the best offering from Ship's Company, let's hope their other mainstage productions were more interesting.

A Tale of Two Plays

I should have posted this ages ago, but life got too fun to blog for a while.
We went to the opening night of The Gin Game in Wolfville on Thursday July 30. It is the newest attempt to bring live theatre to Wolfville in the summer, a town that already has too much going on. A new production company named Wolfville Summer Theatre (imaginative, yes?) is presenting two plays this summer at the Al Whittle Theatre.
The Gin Game is a two act play with two actors, which in the biz is referred to as a Two Hander; but really should be called a four hander unless it is done by a couple of war amps. Two Handers are often picked by small and fledgling companies to keep the costs to a minimum because along with a small cast, they usually have only one or two sets. This explains why WST's second production, Love Letters, is also a Two Hander.
The Gin Game had very good production values. By this I mean, the set was fun to look at, the lighting adequately set the mood, and the sound didn't annoy me too much. (Which is the best praise as I can usually give to sound.)
The acting was very good, in fact Carolyn Hetherington is always very impressive although we thought perhaps Lee J Campbell was miscast for his role.
If this sounds like faint praise, remember that I, my honey and my best friend are a hard audience to impress. We usually completely deconstruct the whole performance on the car ride home and some of our nitpicking included:
The costumes were not broken down and old looking.
The sound cues were too abrupt.
The second act suffered from bad direction.
Ms Hetherington seemed to be channeling Jessica Tandy, who originated the role.
The worst of the whole, is that the Gin Game is a boring play. I actually fell asleep in the second act, and I don't think I missed anything.
Contrast all this with Two Planks and a Passion's new production of Rockbound. Only 3 nights after Gin Game put me to sleep, Rockbound made me want to stand and cheer, even after 2 1/2 hours of bum numbing bleachers at Ross Creek's Centre for the Performing Arts. Rockbound is a new two act play by Allen Cole, and is based on the 1928 novel of the same name by Frank Parker Day, which won the CBC Canada Reads contest in 2005. Funny, poignant, use all the adjectives you want, this is a great piece of theatre, if you missed it at Ross Creek, go see it at the Chester Playhouse Aug 13-16. The music is complex, but while it wasn't catchy like trite musicals tend to be, I find that I can still hum two of the themes a week later. All the actors made me believe that they were their characters, even as some doubled up roles. The precise staging and use of simple scenic elements to advance the story is what good theatre always strives for. No bells and whistles just real emotion, it was the best play I've seen for years. Go see it if you have the chance.

What Else I Did on my Summer Vacation

I spent last weekend on the South Shore showing off yet another bit of beautiful coastal Nova Scotia to my friend who has the misfortune not to live here. We visited the LaHave Frenchies where we both scored new to us treasures.
Then we drove down the LaHave River and on to Lunenburg; which was crazy busy due to the Folk Fest happening that weekend. Neither of us being fond of anything associated with acoustic guitars we ate a picnic lunch overlooking the harbour and moved on to Mahone Bay where a liquid afternoon spend in the Crown and Anchor prepared us for nice supper at the Cheesecake Cafe.
Sunday we went to Chester hoping to meet a millionaire who wanted to sweep us off our feet. Alas it was not to be, but we did ogle some nice houses and sailboats before driving to Bayswater Beach, where the sand was too hot for sitting and the water too cold for swimming. I got a sunburn on my feet because who can ever remember to put sunscreen there?
Cleveland Beach was another stop, where the water was warmer. Lastly, of course Peggy's Cove was a must before ending in Halifax for her to start the last leg of the trip with another friend.
Just to prove it, here are the pics. (Lori)
Hanging baskets are so declasse. Lunenburg decorates their light poles with seafood instead.










Mahone Bay's Three Churches. If you want a better shot, buy a postcard. That iconic picture doesn't exist unless you go tromping through someone's backyard.




And Peggy's Cove as it should be. No Tourists. No Car Park.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

Summer has finally arrived. Both meteorologically with the heat, and metaphorically in that I've been having some fun. I count a successful summer by the number of times I have to dig around in the camping equipment box. Because summer fun cannot be had without needing something out of that box. Bug spray, beach booties, picnic supplies. So far I've been in there three times, and Peter once. There have been summers (the last one for example) where I didn't need to go in there at all. Score one for Nova Scotia.
I fully give credit to this being the summer of visitors. A friend is visiting from Vancouver right now and so we are doing all the summer fun things that I never do unless trying to convince a CFA that this really is a good place to live. Like visiting the sandy beach only 2 minutes down the road, or going for ice cream at a place that has a great view of 4 counties. Like walking the dykes, throwing a back yard neighbourhood barbecue or hiking to Cape Split.
Yes. that's right. Hiking. Me. I've been known to hike before. But the trek to Cape Split was a new one for me. I'm from the other side of the Minas Channel, so Cape Split was always a place that you looked at while sipping a beer at a friends cottage in Diligent Harbour. Where I come from no one would be crazy enough to want to walk there. It is completely inaccessible. Except here, where people seem to think it is a right of passage to take life in limb and wander off into the woods on a badly marked and treacherous "Not a trail" just for the reward of getting really close to those spires.
We were lead to believe that it wasn't really a hike so much as a walk. We were also lead to believe that it was a 3 hour tour. Maybe for someone with the legs of a giraffe, but it took us two hours to walk in, two hours to drink a bottle of wine to recuperate and two hours to walk out. When I say walk I mean climb over and under trees, scramble over rocky paths, hop over the muck holes and inevitably slip slide into them when you lost your footing.
Once we got there I had the strange experience of seeing something completely familiar from photos yet knowing I had never been there. It was like going to Stonehenge. And experienced hiker that I am, I remembered the cork screw but forgot the camera. You'll just have to take my word for it.

And Another Thing...

Today I arrived at work to find a list of 'suggestions' of what we should plant in the new Town Centre Bed. My comment yesterday about spirea was a joke, but it was on the list this morning. I swear, I'm not making this up.
Also on the list was privet (oh yeah, that's original) and a clarification that the Euonymus should be the yellow and green one (sorry Lori) called Emerald n' Gold (yes, the 'N apostrophe' is really part of the name.)
So now I'm really starting to get into the idea of making the absolute ugliest garden possible to plant in the centre of Main St., and I'm taking suggestions for other over used, banal and uninteresting specimens. Remember they have to be under 4 feet high for shrubs please, and the trees should also be small because the planters are not that big.
Already on the list are daylilies and crabapple trees. I'm thinking of adding gold pfitzer juniper.
Anyone else with plants we love to hate?

Venting

Sometimes it seems I only use this page to vent. Like today, when I found that 4 bureaucrats with no plant knowledge have vetoed my landscape design for the new Town Centre and asked that I make it:
"Less prickly"
"Shorter" and
"More Shade"
Translation: "We don't want evergreens. We want deciduous trees, and make the shrubs dwarfs so we can still see the cars in the parking lot behind."

These were the criteria which I had used to select plants:
Hardy to wind, drought, full sun, pollution and road salt.
Multi season interest.
Must be plants not already in use in a Town green space, with the idea that it will help inform the public on a wider variety of plant material available.
Must be available in a local nursery. Buy local.

One of the bureaucrats, who fancies himself a bit of a gardener, also suggested both Euonymus and Crimson King Maple instead of the choice and rare evergreens I had selected.
Note: Being known as an avid gardener is not the same as knowing anything about plants, and shouldn't be thought synonymous with taste either.
Crimson Kings are a selection of Norway maple, those are the ones responsible for spreading the black tar spot fungus blotting the landscape every summer. The also have a tendency to generate thousands of seedlings which grow anywhere and everywhere. They should be banned from sale.
The only thing wrong with Euonymus is that it is an obvious choice. And by obvious I mean common. And by common I mean banal and pedestrian. Familiarity breeds contempt. And I do find euonymus contemptible. In my opinion, if a plant has to be variegated to be interesting, then it really isn't interesting, is it?

A number of thoughts went through my head at their plant suggestions.
One was that, if I added some daylilies and some spirea it would look as good as a Walmart parking lot.
Another was that it was a little like telling Degas that "the Ballerinas are nice, but had he ever thought of painting dogs playing poker?"
I cannot get autocad to export the landscape plan to a jpeg or bitmap file for your viewing pleasure, so here is the elevation sketch I submitted. I am posting it here because no one will ever see it otherwise. Try picturing it without evergreens and with shorter shrubs in the centre. And while you are at it, change the sign to one that says "Mud View Trailer Park - The folks that live here are homely."

Close Only Counts in Horseshoes

When we began the shower adventure, the plan was to have it completed for Peter's mum to be able to use it when she visits this year.
She arrives Thursday, and here is our progress so far:
1. Tile sun porch floor to use it as a clay studio -check
2. Make clay extruder for accent tiles - check
3. Make accent tiles - check
4. Build shower stall - check
5. Tile shower stall - ummmm...


Well, we got close didn't we? This is how close. Note, one wall is 3/4 tiled, another is 1/2 tiled. The other two walls are still untiled. No door, no floor, no glass block window either.


Even if we tiled tomorrow night and Tuesday night, and all day Canada Day, I doubt the tiles would be all finished, and then it takes a couple days to set before you can grout it. We are not moving too fast. What you see is the result of 8 hours work. Four hours yesterday morning and 4 more today. And frankly we're pooped. Tile setters earn their money.

So If we worked really hard and ignored Betty altogether during her visit, it might be ready by the time she leaves.

Valiant effort, but still a failing grade I'm afraid. Poor Betty will just have to have a bath.

The holes you see in the corners will be shelves. And the blue tiles (that look quite black in the picture) are going to interfere with the escutcheon on the tap so we still have to figure out how to cut them elegantly around that. Our tile cutter won't cut circles, and the wet saw seems to chip them quite a bit. We think we will just grind them down a little.
I have to say though, I do like the look.

Happy Summer Solstice

I have come to realize that I eat my way through the year.
First it is fiddle heads. This is a favourite of the other one, being from New Brunswick originally. Fiddle heads are eaten by the pound with every meal for about 10 days until they disappear from the roadside farm markets.
Fiddle heads are followed closely by asparagus and rhubarb. Creamed asparagus on puff pastry. Asparagus quiche, asparagus steamed, asparagus raw and direct from the garden patch when i'm weeding.
Rhubarb custard pie, rhubarb crisp, stewed rhubarb and ice cream.
Last week I gorged myself on foreign cherries while waiting for the cherries on my tree to ripen enough for the birds to cheat me again (for the 6th year in a row)
This weekend I indulged and bought the first strawberries on offer to make shortcake. That will keep me happy for the next 14 days until new veggies for hodgepodge come along, followed by raspberries, blackberries and peaches, tomatoes, peppers and squash.
All these things I have in my own garden, but mostly I buy to supplement what is never enough.
We spent the weekend with friends at Milford House down by Annapolis this weekend. We hiked in the rain and ate. Kayaked in the rain and ate. Read books by the fireplace and ate. Knitted by the fireplace and ate. And one clever spouse was observant that we are all fortunate to live in such a place.
Indeed. Happy Solstice.

Suffering for my Art

On Tuesday evening Patsy and Edwina crashed the NSCC graduation ceremony at the Middleton Campus. A friend had the misfortune to be Valedictorian for the COGS campus so we went to hear his speech (and freak him out a little).
In fact his girlfriend (not shown here) made the crowned crusaders a trio. Her pale lavender gown complimented our lime green and pastel pink ones perfectly. When we stood together we looked like moon mist ice cream.
We were a hit with every little girl in the room. And truth be told, people were taking our picture while we were taking his as he crossed the stage.
It was a memorable evening, but the junk jewelry have given me a painful rash on my neck and ears.
And before anyone comments, fur is a renewable resource.