painted out

If you ever need the inside of your sauna painted while it is operating, or maybe if they need a fresh coat on the foyer of hell, I think I can do it. Three days of toiling in what must be the hottest room in anybody's house have finally paid off in a very cool looking (but hot-feeling) bedroom.

After our son helped with the prep work I decided to paint solo. It would have been a better mom thing to work together with him, but he was stressed to the gills just looking at it, and very grateful when I offered him the job of chief cook and bottle washer in return for me being the painter. He wants a fresh room and he'll love the results, but participating in the transition is excruciating for him so why make him suffer? Remember, this is the kid who decided not to change the colour at Christmas because it would be too stressful. Change is hard for him, so I think that adapting the task was the right thing to do.

Anyway, despite the heat, I love painting. It's kind of like swimming though. You stand around at the edge of it thinking Ugggg but once you start it's great. There's a rhythm to the work and the radio to listen to, and the satisfaction of saying goodbye to the old colour and making a big transformation in a short time. It's good for the shoulders too. Remember The Karate Kid and how he conditioned by staining the fence. Painting is a workout if you work at it.

Tomorrow we should be able to move the furniture back in, stick the light switches and outlet plates back on, re-attach the doorknob and see what the new bedroom really looks like. It's also our last day of vacation. Eighteen days is goooood.

question: what will I paint next?

mompoet - wondering if a room gets smaller everytime you paint it....

life imitates art imitates cooking...

I think it began when I took the kids to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I've been obsessing about the scene where Violet Beauregard turns into a blueberry after chewing blueberry pie chewing gum. Now everywhere I look..blue blue blue blue blue

question: blue?

mompoet - luckily I never chew gum

Late July Bounty

Andy and I picked 34 pounds of blueberries on Friday morning. We got out to the farm at 8am. Lots of people were there already. It was cool and damp and we heard roosters and horses and smelled cows. It took us 3 hours to fill 8 buckets. We go to a place in PoCo called Granny Franny's. It's run by a guy who is meticulous about his field and plants and watchful of u-pickers. The berries are spectacular. Here's my favourite way to enjoy them.

question: what's your favourite food of summer?

mompoet - baking muffins

paint chips

Son and I washed and prepped his bedroom walls today. We're in the midst of patching, and should start painting tomorrow morning. I picked up the paint this afternoon. Going to the paint store is funny. I like to watch what colours people choose and try to imagine the room they will be living in with that colour. There was a fairly stressed-out young couple desperately trying to match a creamy beige that they last had mixed in 2000. Not being appreciative of beige I thought it was funny - who cares? Beige is beige! But if it's your beige in your beige room, then it is important. I bet they have a white couch and a brown dog. Then there was this older guy who was painting the wood trim on his old trailer forest green. He had the paint stir stick from the last time he painted it, but not the old can of paint for the code, and he wanted just the same colour. They have a scanner at the paint store that can duplicate colours. It turned out to be a near-perfect match. Then there was the sweet looking lady who had 6 gallons, one each of a sherbert pastel - pink, green, yellow, purple, blue and a pale grey. I wonder if she's decorating an ice cream store, or maybe painting a mural with happy elephants? For our son, I got tinted primer (I do love primer!) and deep blue for the walls. Andy convinced me that the ceiling still looks great from the last time we did it so we'll just leave it. As I was leaving I caught the beige couple looking askance at my 2 gallons of midnight blue. I smiled at them and thought, "come over to the dark side!" Paint is just paint. It's the easiest and cheapest way to make a dramatic change in your living environment, like dying your hair or buying a new sweater can make a change to your personal appearance. I like it!

question: What do you think the pastel 6 pack is all about?

mompoet - not beige!

summer vacation book review

I read three novels at the lake:

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by JK Rowling

How I Spent My Summer Holidays by WO Mitchell

Wally by Greg Kramer

All three are coming-of-age "boy stories." All three were great and taken close together with some overlaps, very satisfying. They were also great vacation reads, taking me to places where I've never been.

Wally is set in Wales, London and Vancouver, all in theatres. It's about a guy who feels hurt from boyhood and spends his life chasing down something he can't even figure out what it is. The main character is pessimistic but loveable, and the novel is compelling because the story keeps taking him to the brink of happiness then veering off into worlds of self-destruction. Of the three, this was the most frustrating for me because I couldn't see eye-to-eye with any of the characters, but I was hooked by their complex and authentic personalities and predicaments and the world of the theatre in which the story is set.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation is set in a prairie town in the summer of 1924. It's every bit as sensational as Wally, in turns hilarious and heart-rending. I loved the characters and the portrayal of small town social life and morality. The main character, 12-year old Hugh is fabulous and real, and there are all kinds of interesting other people like King Motherwell, a man from the town who convinces Hugh and his friend Peter to help in shelter an escaped mental patient in a cave that the boys dig out on the prairie. There's one great scene where "Blind Jesus," another mental patient, wanders into a revival meeting baptism in the river. It's beautiful.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is set in Hogwarts. JK Rowling got this one right, although I half-wish she'd write shorter sentences, only because I have read every one of the Harry Potter books aloud more than once (well, I just finished my first out-loud of the sixth) and it's exhausting to stay on top of the sentences and read them well. That small criticism aside, the second-to-last book in the series balances humour and drama beautifully and carries Harry, Ron and Hermione along as they grow into young adult wizards. The continuing conflict with Voldemort and the Death Eaters is very nicely developed and the promised death of a major character is shocky-chokey just as I thought it would be. JK Rowling has given up on trying to continuously recap what's happened in past volumes, which helps keep the pace brisk and prevented the book from being 1,000 pages long, no doubt. Oh yeah, there's lots of kissing, but that's appropriate as the wizards are in the thick of puberty. My only complaint is not enough Hagrid. He's been my favourite character since Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. If I got a tattoo, it would be of Hagrid.

I didn't set out to read three boy books but I did. I'm glad I did. I recommend them all. Don't read Wally if you're already depressed unless you want confirmation that you should be. Get ready to stay up late if you read Summer Holidays or Half Blood Prince. You won't want to put them down.

Now I'm reading Sylvanus Now by Donna Morrissey. We're passing it around the neighbourhood and it's my turn. I'm gobbling it up.

question: is binge-reading the best thing about summer vacation?

mompoet - turning pages

pie-pod?

New Weebl and Bob 'toon out now.

question: why doesn't my daughter think this is funny?

mompoet - dough brain

party

Nine slept in our basement last night. I think "slept" might be an exaggeration. The nice thing about 11-12 year olds though is they are old enough to sleep in. They all quieted around 4am and woke at 10. After eating prodigious quantities of fruit, pancakes and bacon they are now singing in the basement as they stuff their sleeping bags and sort out their belongings for an 11am pickup. We're keeping 3 guests until mid-afternoon. Maybe they'll go swimming, maybe they'll make a movie. Andy is going to the beach. Son and I will prepare his bedroom for painting. In this heat, his ceiling is going to suck up a gallon or two of paint, but that's okay. It needs it! The dog will be glad when some of these extra girls go home.

Gotta go, the minivan caravan is arriving to retrieve girls.

question: what?

mompoet - bye

picture picture?

Blogger says it has an easier way to post pictures. This is a test. Only a test.

This is a picture of me washing dishes at camp. I think we ate spaghetti. The person who washes the spaghetti dishes is entitled to many privileges and special treatment because spaghetti dishes are very yucky!

When we camp, we wash dishes just once a day, usually in the evening. That's a tree beside me, watching to make sure that I am doing a good job. Out of the picture are Andy, enjoying a beer by the lake, Alex, wading on the shore in the gathering darkness, and Fiona, the photographer.

So I guess you'll actually be seeing me from time to time in the blog. Hope you can stand it.

question: can you see it?

mompoet - imagining images and deciding what to share

my beach

After lunchtime our back deck is cool and breezy. We have flowers spilling out of pots and planters, thanks to Andy's green thumb (he purchases, plants and feeds - I water). We have tall chairs out there so you can see over the rail to the trees and the inlet down below. I finished reading Harry Potter to our son out on the deck last night. Today I have spent a couple of lazy hours with newspapers and magazines. We have meals out there too, and sit out in the evening with drinks (we have little lights that look like insects for a festive atmosphere). Mostly I like to put my feet up and read. I loved the week at the lake, but this is my beach. Home sweet deck...ahhhhh.

question: where is your beach?

mompoet - getting the hang of holidaying and still a week to go

Happy birthday dear 12-year old

Our daughter is 12 today. She has planned her own birthday (takes after her mom, I think). I have instructions NOT to clean the house. We have pie instead of cake, and we're going to the Spaghetti Factory for supper. That's the "family birthday." Tomorrow is the "friends birthday." Ten girls, lazer tag and a sleepover. There will also be a water balloon fight, makeovers and decorating flip flops with foam shapes and fake flowers. I let her experiment on mine and they are gorgeous and over-the-top. Like Carmen Miranda only on my feet.

When I was her age we called them "thongs." But that means something else now. I keep threatening to walk into Shoppers or London Drugs with her and say "My daughter and I need some THONGS! Where d'ya keep 'em?" That would cause her to die of embarassment. She also told me I am not allowed to shave my head, not that I was planning too, but sometimes I threaten to, just to make her nervous. I also have this jean jacket from 1986 that I put on and pretend I'm going to wear when we're heading to the mall. It has a million zippers and big lapels, shoulder pads. Very retro but totally unacceptable. Maybe I'll wrap it up and give it to her tonight as a birthday present. She'll either put it in her movie-making costume box or burn it.

Congratulations daughter! You have made it to the thick of adolescence. Congratulations to us for making it too! We should all shave our heads, dress in bad clothes and go talk loudly in outdated and inappropriate slang at the Spaghetti Factory. Yeahhh!

question: why didn't anyone tell me it would be this much fun?

mompoet - walking the line between individual and non-embarassing parent

do it yourself dog psychology - part 2

We are new dog people. Soleil, our first canine ever, has lived with us for 2 1/2 years now, and we're figuring it out one step at a time.

Lately she's been peeing in the living room. It's digusting! Our new carpet does not show a dark spot when it's wet so sploosh! you just step in it. At least when she pees downstairs we can see it, and the carpet in the basement is in 12 inch square tiles that we can pick up and put into the laundry tub to wash. In general, she waits to pee outside but if she is sick or upset she sometimes pees in the house. It's very smelly and wet. Yuk.

We have a carpet-washing machine, which I have used a couple of times in recent weeks to attack the spot where she has gone, but I think she can still smell it (truth is I can still smell it and I'm not even a good smeller) and once a dog has a pee spot, she goes back to it. So how do we fix this? We never see her doing it, so she knows she's not supposed to. She's smart enough to wait until we're not looking. We don't want to yell at her because that is mean and it would just scare her and it would sound like, "BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA SOLEIL! BLA BLA BLA etc."

So I'm going with the same approach as the dog pajamas, which, by the way, have succeeded in curtailing her rump de-forestation habit very well. The living room rug has been washed again and liberally doused with "Nature's Miracle" smell-remover as recommended by the vet. The living room has been barricaded with chairs except when we are supervising the dog directly, so that the washed and treated rug can dry completely. When it is completely dry, I'm going to put down a plastic cover with towels over it. Hopefully this will prevent her from finding any lingering scent-trail that might induce repeat peeing. If she pees there, it'll be on the towels which will be easy to clean up, and the plastic will protect the rug. I'm hoping/predicting that a month with no access to the peeing field will break the cycle. We'll see.

question: why are dogs so doggone doggy?

mompoet - climbing over chairs to get to the couch

Cuke, I am your Father

My uncle in Ithica sent this too me. If you like Star Wars or vegetables or if you are concerned about the future of the planet, you'll like it.

question: ever made a salad with a light sabre?

mompoet - I yam what I yam

the world is a weebl

When I was just a little to old to want one, there were these toys called Weebls. They were little egg-shaped people with weights at their fat-ends. There was a song on the TV ads: Waddaya love about a Weebl? Weebls wobble, but they don't fall down.

The world has been weebly these past 48 hours or so...

Getting home from vacation was great. We had a wonderful, relaxing, sunny time. Daughter had an awesome time at Grandma and Grandpa's (my mom and dad's). They got to know her in a new way, keeping her for 4 nights as they did, and she them. This is very good. I hope that our son has the same opportunity some time soon. The kids and the Gr's experience each other differently without the parental layer mediating. Of course, when daughter came home to our house, she opened up her pressure valve and gave her beloved parents all of the tension she had saved up being nice at Gr and Gr's house. But that was to be expected. Also, she's ramping up for a pretty ambitious birthday party - lazer tag and sleepover for ten, with a craft and food and fitting 10 girls in our small rumpus room for the night. I finally told her I was feeling pressured by her preparations and she has calmed it down. She's pretty good stuff, and growing up. She'll be 12 on Monday. (I know I was every bit as intense and un-buffered at that age). I have to remember that 12 year olds don't always remember that moms have feelings, but they respond well if I say it directly.

We came home from vacation a day early to see our daughter's performance of Grease - the culmination of her two week drama camp. The show was on Friday afternoon. Grandma and Grandpa came too. But Grandpa didn't make it in to the theatre as the play was starting (having dropped of Grandma and gone to find a parking spot). We were called outside just as the show was about to begin to find the paramedics attending and my dad on the ground. It seems like he parked the car then blacked out on the way into the theatre. Mom and I went to Emergency with him. They kept him there for about 10 hours and ran all kinds of tests and found nothing. He couldn't remember anything much about anything for about an hour but most of it came back after that. Today he seems back to normal but they'll follow up. I was scared when I saw my dad lying on the lawn with blood on his face and clearly confused and disoriented. I wanted to protect my mom, who was really scared. I'm so grateful that he's well now but we want to know what it was and how we can make sure it doesn't happen again. The upside is that the firehall/ambulance depot is right next door to the civic complex where the theatre is, and Eagle Ridge Hospital is across the street, and my house is 10 minutes down the road. Dad picked about the best place possible to have an emergency. I was able to help by staying at the hospital until the initial alarm subsided, then going to fetch some supper, cooked by Andy, so Mom and Dad did not have to eat the hospital food while they sat in Emerg and waited for test after test after test.

In between bringing supper to the hospital and picking up Mom and Dad when they finally finished around 11pm, Andy and I watched Closer on dvd. Andy liked it. I hated it. Not because it's about infidelity, but because I couldn't find a heart or soul in the story. The movie was beautiful to look at, but empty. That's not a moral judgement. I can love a story about someone who does awful things if I can understand why, and connect with the heart of the person. In closer, these unreasonably beautiful people just keep changing partners like a square dance. I love you do-si-do Nope, now I don't after all promenade your partner I love her allaman-left I never did after all, bow to your partner. Oh well, at least there was not shooting or explosions. Andy said the point of it was that it was a story about personal emptiness. I still didn't like it or get it. Probably a bad choice for an interlude during a stressful evening.

Today I went to the Summer Dreams Reading Festival put on by Pandora's Collective, which was wonderful. Great performances and lots of spoken word/literary friends, all at Robson Square in the sunshine. Tonight I took the kids to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Johnny Depp, which was lovely and much more true to the original than the Gene Wilder version - except for an ending twist that is totally invented. Why do they do that??? Do people who make movies actually believe that audiences need a caramel sledgehammer of an ending? Oh well.

Back at home I read out loud to our son, two more chapters of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which we bought on Saturday in Osoyoos and we've been barelling through. We have 5 chapters to go and I know it will be shocky-chokey reading. He's used to me pausing to recapture my composure when the story swoops me up as I read it. "Mom, are you crying? It's okay Mom. It's just a story." Already I cried on the beach while I was reading it to him at camp. There's more to come.

Waddaya love about the world? It may wobble but you don't fall down.

question: do I have a weight in my fat-end?

mompoet - tell you about the dog psychologist thing tomorrow

phalanges

and carpals and tarsals and metacarpals and metatarsals and the stringy springy tendon-ligamenty stuff the makes them dance, clap and assemble fajitas, all AOK today.

question: did you ever eat with your feet?

mompoet - going to bed before I become a bat and hang out inside of tree bark by the tips of my capable toes

when i pass by a house with zinnias

growing in the garden, I want to knock on the door and give a big hug to the person who has planted and tended them and say, "Thank you for such extravagant beauty."

question: what was it I was supposed to be doing today?

mompoet - eyes popping at flowers the size of my head

toe's good

We had a wonderful time in Osoyoos. One week living on the beach in our bathing suits was very relaxing. I read three boy books, including the new Harry Potter, swam, and talked with my family and friends who we see up there every year. Not much to do, which was exactly perfect.

I did slam my baby toe into a tree root (twice) and it's been hurting like the dickens - so much that I was ready to go to the doctor today if it wasn't improving. But last night, after my first shower from which I did not step directly out into sand and dirt, I took a really good look at it. I managed to chop a big flap of skin off the tip of the toe and it was still partly attached. I took it off and it already feels much better. So the pain radiating up my foot was probably not from a fractured phalange. I'll test it out today, but I think it's okay.

question: did you ever notice how nice your own house is when you come back?

mompoet - toasty with fair to good toe-integrity and happy to be home

I'm back

I think I have a tan, but it might be dirt. I'll tell you after I have a shower.

Check out the latest ipod device

More later - going to shower now...

question: cherries anyone?

mompoet - multi-layered and a bit limpy

I am on Vacation

Today I learned that I can take good photographs with a digital camera. I have been a 35mm slr holdout for a couple of years but I caved and tried the little digital camera that Andy bought about 6 months ago. It works. I have to get used to looking at a moving image in a viewfinder, and there's more of a delay between intention and capture than with a film camera, but I can get used to it. I took a really cool photo of a small girl who had just let go of a bow string. The arrow was gone, but her hand was still shaped like string-release and also like surprise. It's a good picture.

I still have not learned to post photos on my blog so I can't share it here. Oh well, one thing at a time.

Work is done, at least for the next two weeks. I found out yesterday afternoon that they are going to paint all of the offices at my work while I am away. Ooops, somehow I didn't get the email a week or so ago. Luckily I got curious when there were paint chips everywhere and maintenance guys sticking their noses into my office. So I had time to pack up my bric a brac and get the art and calendar off the walls. My office is 5-sided and the smallest in the place, but I love it. the fifth wall is perfect for a painting. The walls will be beige or blue when I return. They haven't decided yet (the deciders, not the walls). (notbeigenotbeigenotbeigenotbeige) I hope they will be blue.

Most of what we need is packed for our camping trip that begins tomorrow. Dog and cat care is arranged. I washed and chopped fruit and veggies so I will have something nice when the festival of potato chip eating begins. I have 4 novels and two books of poetry and one magazine. I have blank paper. I have a digital camera. I am on vacation.

question: what shape is surprise?

mompoet - 5-sided

iiiiiiiii-iiiiiiiii-iiiiiiiii-tch

Look out. I itch. Urgggg. I'm going to have to wear footsie pajamas to bed to stop from scratching all night. Ooooch. Yuk. I want to lie on the floor with my head in one spot and run around in circles, scraping my legs on the carpet. Iiiiiiiiiiii-iiiiiiiiii-iiiiiii-tch!

question: why did God make mosquitoes? (oh yeah, to feed the bats and the fish and the birds)

mompoet - are you kidding? I don't own any footsie pajamas!

sophie vs the roomba

My dad sent me this video.

I think Sophie likes it. What do you think?

question: woof?

mompoet - no, I don't have one yet (a roomba I mean)

ps Don't you love it when a dog backs up?