Day 4 Blog Challenge

Day 4 of the Mindful Living Blog Challenge is about the body. 

 

The older I get the more I am aware that my overall health and wellbeing is largely in my own hands.  Two years ago my doctor told me that even though I was not very overweight, I was heavier than I should be.  That, combined with high blood sugar levels on an ongoing basis prompted me to make further lifestyle changes.

Those changes have made such an incredible difference to me.  Not only am I now consistently within the BMI definition of normal weight range for me, but I am strong and fit with far fewer aches and pains than I once had.  I would say at 55 I am in the best shape of my life.

My body would say thank you for saving me!

What I have discovered is that I enjoy the process of being good to my body.  I love cooking foods from scratch, and growing them myself if I can.  I love to share recipes and ideas with other people. 

My daily swims are quite meditative in themselves.  The rhythm of the strokes and the breath, and having my face in the water and the goggles on, make this a 30 minute part of the day when I am very focused on my body and my mind is free from everything except what is happening right now.

Naked Ladies and Burning Bushes

Jacob, the golden retriever-on-loan and I spent last weekend together at the country estate while Chuckles was away on a hunting trip.  We enjoyed a visit from some friends from Quadra Island who were in town to see a show with their daughter and her husband.  All four made the drive to the country to check out our new place and have a visit.  They also have a small manufacturing business which they relocated from Kelowna to Quadra Island seven years ago.  When I feel overwhelmed by our move, I only have to think of the logistics they had to face and it puts our venture into perspective.

I am enjoying the continuing crop of raspberries that are still producing just enough for a handful for a munch or to put on my cereal in the morning.  I expect that will now be over as we have had some rain, but it has been a sweet treat.

 

Still some raspberries ripening - enough to put on your cereal in the morning!

   

Another of the fall pleasures at the country estate is the low flying flocks of migrating geese that whiz by in formation early mornings and early evenings.  You hear them before you see them, with their cacophony of honking.  I can’t help myself, if I am in the house, I run outside so that I can be underneath them as they fly over.  They are often so low, that I can see their legs tucked up close to their bodies, and their noise is so loud it’s quite thrilling.  If it’s early in the morning when I am still in bed, and they fly directly over the house, I can see them through the skylight above the bed.  This season my choir is singing “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music and one line is “wild geese that fly with the moon on their wing, these are a few of my favorite things”.   I get it.  They’re one of my favorite things, too! 

And of course nothing is more therapeutic to me than being in the garden.  Gardening and choir practice go well together   -    I put in my earbuds and sing, dig, prune, water and weed to my heart’s content!  At the country estate there is some “buffer zone” between me and the neighbors.  In the city, I would suddenly realize I was in the backyard belting out my music, probably driving all the neighbors nuts!

 

So with my earbuds in and Jacob nearby,  I tackled pruning a large, overgrown rosebush and another shrub at the side of the house.  I am not a fan of prickly plants, so I have never really been one for roses, but I also have a hard time "doing-in" a plant,  so the rose bushes around the place have been given a reprieve.  But I swear if I get too many more pokes and scratches, they could be goners!

 

  

Overgrown rosebush at side of house

 



 

Same garden - after



 

  

On Saturday we cleaned up more tree branches and added them to the burn pile which had accumulated since the previous weekend when we had taken down some leaning, rotting trees.  Then it was too foggy to burn, so we covered the pile with a tarp to burn later. 

 

 

Beyond the barn is the tarp covered burn pile, hard to tell but as tall as me!

 

Since burning is only allowed through October, time was of the essence.  Chuckles was going away, so he mixed me up a batch of accelerant, one that would burn slowly and not cause an explosion, and left the burning up to me.  Which I was fine with until my Dad got word and advised me not to do it without Chuckles being there.   That planted the seed of doubt in my mind, and burning barns, forest fires and other worst case scenarios danced around in my head all day Saturday.  Every time I took another load to the fire pile, I stared it down like it was my opponent.  I invited older son and his step daughter Heidi to come for dinner and a bonfire.  In the end, it was absolutely fine, it was a huge roaring blaze that we monitored until bedtime, and in the morning there were just a few smoldering embers left. 

 

Heidi spent Saturday night with Jacob and I and we carved her pumpkin and played gin rummy until late.  She and Jacob slept in Sunday morning, then we took Jacob for a walk before Heidi had to go home.

Heidi designing her pumpkin face

 



 

Heidi and Jacob on our Sunday morning walk

 

 

I am a plant rescuer.  At the garden center, I am the person that buys all the bedraggled, half dead specimens off the clearance table and takes them home, loves them, and brings them back to health.  We have a little azalea that Chuckles found in a pot, abandoned at the park, half brown with most of the leaves missing.  He brought it back to me.  I promised it that it was going to a better place, and took it out to the country estate.   I gave it a nice feed of well composted horse manure when I planted it, and it is positively beaming with health and happiness now, I swear!

 

 My latest rescues are a couple of garden mums that I picked up from the nursery on Sunday.  I am in the process of resurrecting the central driveway garden at the country estate that was full of weeds and cracked and depleted soil when we moved in.  I have added a mountain of the composted horse manure to the soil, and dug it all in.  I now have over 3 dozen daffodil bulbs planted throughout, thanks to the seniors at the hall where choir practices.  In the fall they sell bags of bulbs for $2 each,  and the fewest bulbs per bag I have bought is 12.  One bag this year had about 20 small bulbs in it!  Such a bargain!  The mums are side by side near the big rock, and a I got a few pansies to add a bit of colour.  I will continue to build the garden up as I find and add larger rocks around the perimeter, but at least there is some colour in it now, and in spring it will be alive with daffodils.

 

Driveway Garden with Plants

 

 

One of Chuckles buddies added a small headless plastic cross-legged girl ornament beside my naked lady statue in the driveway garden.  He put it there as a joke, but I’m leaving it.  Perhaps the two “ladies” will attract more as time goes by.

 

Headless Ornament added as a joke

 

My garden statue

 

This coming weekend is the earnest start to the barn renovation, which is more Chuckles department than mine, I am just the cheerleader and kitchen staff for that endeavor.  If the weather is good, I hope to do more work in the garden, if it rains there is more painting to be done inside.  Needless to say, there will be something to keep me busy.  

 

Gridlock in the City

As it so often happens, life has as way of clarifying whether or not you are making the right choices. 

So it happened on Tuesday evening when I drove my parents to the airport.

They live in the sleepy little coastal community of Gibsons, BC.  A lovely place indeed, as long as you never need to A) go there or, B) leave there.  That necessitates a trip on BC Ferries, which is an idyllic 45 minute mini-cruise through the picturesque fjords of Howe Sound.  Sounds lovely, doesn't it?  And it is, minus the expense,  the mind-numbing lineups of traffic at both ends, the overpriced and underwhelming food choices on board and the general inconvenience of having to travel at a scheduled time other than what is convenient for YOU.

So it was on Tuesday that my parents needed to leave Gibsons in order to get to Vancouver Airport to fly to Prince George, BC to visit my sister and her family.  Their choices of transport modes were limited from the ferry to the airport, and none of them really worked.  None of the ferry sailings coincided very well with the WestJet flight times.  The coach from Gibsons would get them to the airport 4 hours before their flight, which meant a long wait and a long day.  The transit bus would be difficult for a couple in their late 80's juggling canes, luggage and a laptop, and necessitate quite a lot of walking.

So, to the rescue was I - offering to pick them up at the ferry terminal and drive them to the airport.  Across the city.  At rush hour.  Since I rarely have to deal with the fray that is Vancouver traffic (except for our little commute from work to home which is all of 10 minutes) I manage to convince myself every time that it won't be that bad.  A bit like childbirth. 

And it's always much worse that I expected, a bit like childbirth.

I picked them up at 4:30 for their 7:30 flight and the plan was to drive to the airport, park and once they were checked in for their flight we would grab dinner together.

We stopped at a gas station first for Dad to get a bottle of water.  Mom said "hurry Jimmy, don't be long" and I said "Mom we have hours!" Oh, I was still so optimistic at that point!  We crawled over the Lion's Gate bridge, telling each other it would be better once the four lanes had merged into two.  We crawled through the causeway telling each other it would thin out downtown.  When I saw the gridlock that was Georgia St, we turned and went through the West End.  Very slowly, I might add.  Along Beach Ave we were practically parked, but with the motor running.  As a lone cyclist whizzed by in the new cycling lane that used to be for cars, I tried to visualize Mom and Dad on bikes of their own, and simply couldn't, it was too big a stretch.  But we'd get to the airport faster with bikes at this rate.  This stop and go (mostly stop) continued all the way to the airport.



 

Vancouver has the dubious distinction of the worst traffic gridlock in Canada.

 



On Granville St. Dad piped up with "I wonder how our lives would have been different had we bought a house we looked at just off Granville St back when you were a kid?  Instead, we bought the farm in Langley." 

Wow!  Had they done that, Chuckles and I probably wouldn't be moving to Langley again right now!  Actually Chuckles and I probably would never have met, I probably wouldn't have my lovely sons, and my parents might not live in Gibson's now - maybe a downtown condo?  It's so interesting to think about the choices we've made in life and the ones we didn't make, and where they might have led... but I digress.

It was clear when we arrived  at the airport that there was no time for dinner together.  It was well after 6 already and they still needed to check in for their flight.  So, we agreed to part at the departures drop off area, I put their luggage on a cart for them and we said our goodbye's.  It was disappointing for all of us, as we have seen less of each other than usual with the busy-ness of buying the county estate  and selling our city house.

I headed off for home.  At a snail's pace with the traffic still at the peak of snarl.   A stroke of brilliance prompted me to stop at a grocery store along the way to get the groceries I had planned to get at the store close to home.  Why do that?  I could do my shopping now, let the traffic calm down, then drive home under more pleasurable circumstances. 

The grocery stop took about 40 minutes, longer than normal since the store was completely unfamiliar and I had to keep retracing my steps looking for things I needed.  Oh well, more time for the traffic to subside.  I pushed the buggy out to the car at about 7pm, feeling my stomach growl at the smell of the hot BBQ chicken I had bought for dinner.  If I ever got home.

I unloaded the groceries and before I slammed the back gate on my SUV, I impulsively broke open the chicken package and yanked off a leg.  A huge bite later, I stood happily munching chicken in the Superstore parking lot, with chicken grease running down my chin, and no napkin. 

Hmm, with greasy hands I opened the car door and rummaged in the door pocket triumphantly emerging with a scrunched and pre-used Kleenex - that was all that I could find.  It was very inadequate.  Later I realized there was a roll of paper towel in the back, so I was able to clean up, grabbed an apple from my shopping bag and headed off in the much reduced traffic of the evening.

Driving home I thought about the convenience to the Abbotsford airport from the country estate, and the several routes to get us there - through country roads flanked by farmers fields, nary a traffic jam in sight (except Abbotsford Airshow weekend!) and realized that the decision to move where roads are wide, population is light and parking lots are half empty is a great one!

Sky High Skylights

Well my painting project got off to a rocky start. 

The ceilings in the house at the country estate need painting badly.  So obviously that has to be done before tackling the walls.

I decided that the best place to start was with the skylights, of which there are four.  Four tall skylights.  I'm tall, but they are really, really tall.  Sky high, or so it seems when you are teetering up on a ladder, in a narrow passageway with hot sun beaming on your head, and the treetops visible through the skylight (if you are brave enough to open your eyes!).

After breakfast I asked Chuckles if he could help me, so he got the extension ladder from the garage and set it up in the foyer skylight, the lowest of the four.  Good place to begin.  He showed me how to work the ladder, where to set the rung so it was secure, and how to test it before ascending. 

 

Ready to paint the first of the four skylights! 

It took me a while to figure out which parts to paint by hand, what I could reach with the roller from the ladder and what I could reach with the roller attached to a pole and to overcome my fear that the ladder was going to slip out from under me.  Okay - I never overcame that fear.  I just persevered through it.  Unfortunately, on one of the skylight walls, a bit of the popcorn ceiling peeled off when I used the roller on it, but I was able to paint over the spot with the brush and it looks fine.

After an hour, I was done, and moved the whole process into the master bedroom, where the roof is higher, hence, so is the skylight.  Gulp. 

I set up the ladder.  Positioned the rung correctly.  Tested it for non-slip.  Climbed up with my paint pot in one hand and brush in the other.  Was unable to reach the very edge of the glass without climbing higher.  Could not make myself do it.  Climbed down and gave myself a good talking to. 
Didn't work.  Chuckles came in the house, so I told him I was nervous about climbing higher on the ladder.  He climbed to the top, pronounced it safe, went back outside and started up the lawn tractor. 

I can honestly say I hated him in that moment.

Following his lead, I climbed to the step I needed to be on to reach the edge of the glass.  I was actually wimpering.  I was up there, but paralyzed, I couldn't dip into my paint pot and begin.  I climbed back down to assess the situation.  It occurred to me that I needed to free up one hand to be able to hold onto the ladder, that would help.  So, I jury-rigged a bucket tied to the ladder to put my paint pot in, which meant every time I needed to dip my brush I had to go down two rungs, dip, then back up two rungs, paint.  But it worked.  And that was just to get the hand painting done around the edge and down the seams.  Then I used the roller from a lower rung.  However, even more popcorn texture peeled off in this skylight, so it took more work to repair/disguise it.

An hour and a bit later, I moved the entire production into the main bath where the going got tricky.  The skylight is over the bathtup, so I had to finagle the ladder around tub and toilet, as well as covering all kinds of uneven surfaces with drop cloths.  Finally done with that, and knowing that this skylight was even higher than the bedroom skylight, I decided to give myself a break and start with the roller rather than the hand painting.  I hoped I would be able to get so close to the top with the roller that I might not even need to hand paint!  But disaster struck.  First swipe with the roller peeled off a whole bunch of popcorn texture. 

 

It's hard to see, but the popcorn texture is all peeled off above the ladder.

At which point I packed it in.  I just had to walk away, and it was lunchtime.  Over lunch I told Chuckles how frustrated I was and how I had really wanted his help.  He was surprised!  He thought I had wanted to do this myself.  So I clarified my position.  I am good with the walls, even the regular height ceilings.  But I am no sky high skylight painter.  No sir.

An Unexpected Visit

Last weekend Chuckles went to the country estate on Thursday evening, the night before I went.  He arrived at dusk and everything was just as we had left it the Sunday before.  He hit the hay early, having big weekend ahead of him dismantling the barn stalls.

 

 

Here's the barn that is being converted to our workshop.

 

Here's the interior when we purchased the place.

 

 

And here's the interior currently with stalls down.

 

 

When he awoke Friday morning, he took his cup of coffee and went outside to enjoy the cool morning air, and survey his new empire.  To his astonishment, a large section of the landscape fabric we had laid the week before, complete with rocks around the perimeter to anchor it against wind, had been pulled up and bunched into a perfect little nest!  In the center of the next, there had been a small hollow dug, and the fabric was gathered around the hole.

 

 

 

This is the way the landscape fabric was left last weekend.

 

 

 

And here's a couple of pictures of the little nest!

 

 

 

Jenn and I put it all back together again, when we were bark mulching  but this area of landscape fabric is still exposed, because we are going to cover it with driveway material when we bring that in, as it will be a little parking spot.  So, I hope the critter, whatever it was, doesn't do this again, as now the edges are buried under the bark mulch we laid down.  Since we hear coyotes yipping and howling  most nights, it's likely that is what bedded down here. 

 

 

I went out to the barn late in the day on Sunday to call Chuckles in for a piece of .... blueberry pie, and he snapped this photo of me with the disassembled stall front walls.  That's about the extent of my help with the barn reno so far!

 

 

Everything is Big!

When we bought our "country estate" as we have taken to calling our new 5 acre property, we didn't comprehend that everything about it was exponentially larger than our city lot.

Oh, we knew it was bigger - but it's wayyyyyy bigger - the yard, the shrubs, the trees, the distances between things.

One of the first days we were there I took off my jacket during a hot flash, mindlessly put it down and carried on with what I was doing.  Later, when the sun went down and we were relaxing on the back deck, I got chilled and went searching for my jacket.  To the barn - a football field distance from the house - nope, not there, back to the front yard (the football field again), nope not there.  Was it in the trailer, parked beside the barn?  The football field again...you get the picture.  I got the picture - this place is frigging huge! 

And there have been other situations driving the point home....

Watering the front garden meant either - three of our city size garden hoses joined together from the tap at the deck, OR scrambling all the way through the crawl space under the house to turn the water on at the tap on the front yard side of the house.  After a short period of imagining spiders, newts and other real and imagined creepy crawlies that could be under the house, I gathered up three hoses!

Gardening has exploded to a new level.  The shrubs were all quite overgrown when we took over the place at the end of May, so weekends this past month or so have been all about trimming.  Looking back now, we laugh at our first day on the "job" when we rolled over our wheelbarrow, and cut the first few branches off a 10 ft hydrangea.  Ha - wheelbarrow full in less than two minutes.  Bring on the enormous waste disposal bin fortuitously found on side of road, badly caved in on one side.  Chuckles, being Mr. Handyman, heated the plastic and knocked out the dents, thinking this would be a handy vessel at the country estate.  And it is - as a containment device for rubbish destined for our utility trailer, which has proven to be the best garden implement we own.  That and the former hunting buggy, Chuckles Suzuki Sidekick, which has been commandeered as the tow vehicle for the utility trailer as it will go anywhere on the property.  We can now trim bushes all day long and at the end of the day go four-wheeling to the back of the property where we have established a dump pile - of material to be burned when the cool autumn weather arrives. 

We mowed the lawn once by hand, another laughable situation.  Our friend Nick, who lives nearby the country estate, says the neighbors must all realize when city-folk move in at the sound of push mowers starting up!

It only took us the one time - four hours with both of us working at it - one mowing, one weed whacking, to realize that a ride-on was a must have.  So we have a new John Deere mower in the fleet now.

So far we have bought the mower, a good gas weedeater, and a leafblower.  The list of what we still will need keeps on growing!

 

One thing for sure - we won't be bored here, there is always something to do!

 

What Happens When Your Dog Dies

Hi!  When my dog Seymour passed away suddenly last November, it marked the end of a chapter in my life.  I didn't expect that, but that's what happened.

Poor old Seymour suddenly seemed to be going downhill, so a visit to the vet confirmed he had cancer in his spleen.  That was Saturday.  By Monday night he was unable to get to his feet on his own, and so Tuesday morning we had to put him to sleep.  Hard stuff, he was my best buddy.

And that was it - after the fog of grief lifted a bit, I knew I needed change - big change.
 
I am 54 years old, and have had in the back of my mind that I would "retire" at 55 for a number of years, but it's complicated on a number of levels.

My husband, life-partner, lover, friend, occasional enemy (or person I find really really irritating), soulmate and business-partner Chuck (Chuckles) and I own a small manufacturing business which we both work at.  He's not quite at the retirement age or phase yet, so part of the challenge has been working out how I can slow down a bit while he keeps on working.  He likes having me around, we work well together, and our customers like "us" as a package deal.  For those reasons, hiring a replacement has never seemed practical.

We have dreamed of a larger property often, pouring over the property listings online and fantasizing about the life we would have with space for all Chuck's toys and projects (he's a toy and project guy) and the huge garden we could have (I love gardening) and the outdoor space and privacy we could enjoy (we both are outdoorsy and like our personal space!).

So, in May, we bought 5 acres in the country, near where I grew up, about an hour away from Vancouver, BC where we live now, and we are going to renovate the barn, move our business there, and work from home!  I will still be involved, but won't be locked into the 8-10 hours a day just at work, I can be out in the garden, or playing with my new dog (yes! That's part of the plan!) with my iphone on my belt and can take calls, do the books on rainy days and in general devote more time to my own interests.   

One of the things I have always loved is writing, so I thought I'd start a blog about the experience of moving from a big city back to the country after 30 odd years (back for me, Chuckles has always lived in the city).   So here goes....