Updates in list form

Today I offer updates in list form:

1. We are leaving on Friday for a month-long road trip. Most of our time will be spent in Oregon, with stops in Calgary, Seattle, and wherever else we may desire. The trip out is set, but the trip back will be determined later. E-mail if we should add you to our agenda!

2. We have been working hard to get everything ready for our departure, including making sure the yard and garden are all planted and prepared to have someone else look after them with minimal effort. We have planted our new fruit trees, planted the garden, put in sod over the area that was all just dirt before, and made some efforts at weed control by putting down cardboard between rows in the garden and putting compost over the top (we have a bit more interest to do). We even bought a new timer for our sprinkler, so that watering should happen without any intervention.  Our plans for our backyard are coming along nicely, and if all goes as expected, we will come home to a lush green garden.

We even bought a little stone bench to sit on for rests in between bouts of garden work, and those planters are filled with strawberry plants. There is a little blue solar lantern hanging from what was meant to be a plant hanger, but which serves as a little handrail helping me get up into the raised garden area.

I am actually kind of amazed that we have been able to create pretty much exactly my vision for our yard. It has been lots of work, but I'm really happy that I have been able to participate so much in making it happen.

3. Also as part of our preparation for departure, we are hanging out with several friends here this weekend as our last social events before we leave. Last night we stayed at a friends house until midnight, which we never do. However, these friends will be leaving for a two-month trip that begins just before we get back from our one-month trip, so we won't see them for about three months. That meant that I was quite tired this morning and slept in much later than usual. Today was a rare gray rainy day, and it seemed like the perfect thing to do on a lazy Sunday morning in weather like this was to bake some cookies. The other impetus for baking was to get rid of some butter and eggs so that we didn't have to leave them or throw them away before our trip.

The friends we saw this afternoon, and the friends we will hang out with this evening, were/will be the beneficiaries of my baking.

4. I have been able to do a tiny bit of running practice. There is a park about 2 1/2 blocks from our house that has a huge flat grassy expanse that gets very little use. It is the perfect place to practice running. A few days ago Jeff and I went out to this park and did a little bit of running from one tree to another, with rests at a picnic table in between. It did not take long before I was extremely tired, and Jeff noted that I was running sideways instead of ahead. I have a tendency to veer to the right, and apparently this becomes quite extreme when I get tired. The longest stretch I was able to do was probably somewhere between 30 and 40 feet.

All this is somewhere between encouraging and discouraging – one of those times where it is awesome to be able to do something categorically different, something that I absolutely was not able to do a few months ago. But at the same time, it reminds me of what I used to be able to do, and just how far I am from that. It's sort of like this: when I am completely unable to do something, it's a little bit like out of sight out of mind. But then when I can sort of start to do it, there's a new goal, and the difference between where I am and where I want to be seems so huge that it gets a bit discouraging. It seems that I have to deal with this over and over again unless I just want to stop getting better and accept things exactly where they are. But I really don't know how to do that.

5. We accidentally washed and dried a mouse. Jeff opened the dryer door yesterday and right in front of the door on top of the load of laundry there was this little mouse (dead) who apparently had quite a clean shiny coat. A few days ago, Maddy apparently brought a mouse into the house and lost it. We were in the basement when she became extremely interested in something under the couch (which I was sitting on), and Jeff confirmed that there was a live mouse. Then, it was gone. We couldn't find it, Maddy couldn't find it, and although we knew it was not going to end well we did not predict this particular end.

It must have crawled into a laundry basket full of dirty clothes that was in front of the washing machine, and hidden itself so well among the clothes that it got scooped into the washing machine, and then somehow scooped into the dryer. Fortunately, a second wash got out the dead mouse smell from the load it had been washed and dried with, and there was no lingering smell in either the washer or dryer. I am just really hoping that the mouse somehow died peacefully before getting washed and dried.

6. My next blog post will be from somewhere on the road!

Distracting you with pictures of babies

It has been a while since I wrote a particularly long blog post, and that is because I have been fairly busy enjoying the Regina spring. There has been much gardening, some barbecuing, and excursions to events like the Cathedral Arts Festival. I also had to make a very short (40-hour) trip to Portland, which ended up being fun but exhausting.

I hope to write a more substantive blog post this coming weekend, but for now I want to let people know that we will be in Oregon from the evening of June 12 through the end of June. We are road tripping, and will be traveling back and forth between Eugene and Portland and hopefully visiting other wonderful Oregon places. If you will be in Oregon during that time, send me an email and hopefully we can work out some visiting!

And, in the meantime, here are some pictures of Portland friends and their adorable babies to distract you:

Sarah, Matthew, and Sam

Blurry-faced Astrid and Andrea

My New Trick

Not much time for a blog post today, so I will leave you with this:

Baching it

Jeff has been away this week at a conference in Ottawa, so I have had a week of the bachelor lifestyle. I am not usually this cliché when I am home alone, but I had two nights of frozen pizza (with my own added pineapple on top), and two nights of Top Ramen (with added tofu and broccoli).

They say that when the cat's away the mice play, and this mouse has been playing nonstop in the dirt – lots of gardening and yard work. As soon as the snow melted, massive amounts of weeds appeared, and I have been extracting these weeds in preparation for new planting. I am waiting for Jeff to come home (tomorrow) to actually do the planting, because I am still not that great with a shovel – it takes a great deal of balance to be able to stand on one foot while using the other foot to pound a shovel into the ground, and I am not quite there yet. However, I have discovered that I am very good with a hori-hori knife.

Yesterday at the garden center I purchased seeds and seed potatoes, four haskap bushes in one gallon pots, three bags of compost, and some fertilizer. All I need now is someone good at digging holes, and the garden is a go :-)

Backyard Transformation

Jeff and I have spent the past week working on transforming our backyard. Admittedly, Jeff has done most of the hard labor, but I have been out there doing what I can. Unfortunately, I have realized that we have no "before" pictures of the backyard, so the "after" pictures will not be nearly as dramatic as they should be. Some of the transformation happened last year – converting the sandbox into a garden bed, removing aggressive vines from our back fence, and having some sad pathetic little trees and old stumps removed last fall. 

At the beginning of spring this year, we still had an unusable back corner of our yard that was filled with piles of dirt, wood, random pipes, huge rocks (once used decoratively in garden beds I'm sure), and concrete blocks. We also had a chin up bar in front of the garden, and a section of chain-link fence that was jutting out from the main fence for no apparent reason. This weekend we accomplished some major tasks related to our backyard makeover. 

First, we got rid of the chin up bar, though not before Jeff used it for the first and last time:

The remains of the chin up bar

 I had already removed most of the useless section of fence, but the post was still left and we got rid of that too (also seen in the above picture). Several days over the past week were spent removing junk from the unusable back corner of the yard (saving and repurposing what we could) and then spreading out the dirt to make a flat usable space.

Next on the agenda was tree planting. Having gotten rid of several useless trees (a "volunteer" elm tree in the land of Dutch Elm disease, some unhealthy lilacs that had stopped flowering, and a spindly little willow that would not stand up to the wind), we planted four new ones that we actually wanted: an apple tree and three cherry trees/bushes. Here in Saskatchewan cherries don't grow on proper trees, but there are sweet varieties of sour cherries (a seeming contradiction) that grow on trees that are more like bushes, growing to only about 6 feet high. Today Jeff did lots of digging, making holes for our transplants.

It's hard to see, but that's a really big hole just to the left of the tools on the ground

 After planting, there was dirt spreading to do:

A lot of hard work, but worth it for the new view from our windows:

When the trees start to leaf out, and the grass gets greener, and the garden is planted and growing, it will be much more impressive. We also have a few more improvements that we hope to make, and there will be more pictures when we are done!