Toronto heatwave

Congrats to Lissa and Phil on the birth of their baby daughter, Amy! Hopefully it's cooler in Gravesend than it is in Toronto right now.

I am not a hot weather person.

I don't like lying on the beach, baking and sweating. I like sunshine, but not when it's beating down on my head and shoulders like a hundred smothering steaming pounds of boiled cotton. The heatwave-hating part of me feels like lying down in the middle of the sidewalk with my arms outstretched, gasping for air like a hooked fish, blinking sweat out of my eyes.

There's a heat wave in Toronto right now. Another reason I don't like heat waves in the city is because they inevitably come with a smog alert. The horizon is hazy and sometimes tinged with yellow, and I imagine my lungs recoiling in horror.

Postcard from Reb for my collection. She took this photo herself.

I still go for my walks outside, but they are longer and a slower pace. I don't run in this heat; I'd end up in hooked fish mode (see above) for sure.

A SURVEY:
Are you a hot weather person?
Also: do you have air conditioning?

Our new place has air conditioning, but the contractors have advised us not to turn it on yet because it will get filled with drywall dust.

Postcard from Lyanne for my collection.

My new home office is now laid with DriCore subflooring over the concrete, and new carpet. I bought some acrylic paints from Curry's Art Store on Queen to add a bit of colour to the off-white paint (christened "Invisible Rose In Winter", though Judith H. has pointed out: "Your office paint is exactly the colour of the Cranesbill that's just losing it's blossoms. White with the tiniest hint of pink. So, you could also call it 'wild geranium blossom.'")

I've discovered I have to repaint my office door; the paint is already peeling off! Turns out the old paint is oil-based, which means I should have sanded and primed it first before painting an acrylic base over it. Ah well.

I've decided that when renovations are complete, I want to paint a tree in one corner of my office, beside or behind my reading chair (yes, I want a reading corner). Should be interesting considering I've never painted a tree before and never painted with acrylics before. But I figure HEY, if I hate it, I can always paint over it! I also figure I can work on it gradually, and maybe put interesting things in its branches. Suggestions about what kinds of interesting things welcome. :-)

Speaking of renovations...Because of renovation stuff, cottage time, packing (again! must move out of my mom-in-law's condo), moving, and unpacking PLUS trying to get some writing in as well, my Blatherings posts are likely to be sporadic over the next month. I'll likely keep posting some pics to my Flickr page fairly regularly, though, including more Wacom pad doodles.

Thanks to Lyanne and Reb for sending me postcards for my collection, by the way! If you're inclined to send me one, I'd love to add it to the set. Please send to: Debbie Ridpath Ohi, 34 Eglinton Ave. W., P.O. Box 189, Toronto, ON Canada M4R 2H6. Thanks.

And finally, some more garden pics...

Our daylilies are blooming:


Identified by my pals on YouGrowGirl.com as Spiraea, maybe S. japonica:


One of three Saskatoon berry bushes:


Found out from the YouGrowGirl.com community that our new garden has another rose plant! This one is apparently "Cecile Brunner" aka the Sweetheart Rose:

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neighbours, office painting

Hey, look! Our one (1) rose plant is blooming! With one (1) rose!

So Jeff and I went to our (new) neighbourhood's annual street bbq yesterday afternoon. Our cul de sac was transformed into a picnic area with barbecues and folding tables covered with salads, corn on the cob, potatoes, hamburgers, hot dogs, desserts. Everyone brought something; we brought paper plates, serviettes, fruit salad, chocolate and carrot cakes. I borrowed an electric mixer from my sister and bought plastic storage containers from the local grocery store for the fruit salad since most of our kitchen stuff is still in storage.

Ray painting my office.

We had already met most of our neighbours, but this was a chance to get to know them a bit better. And of course they were curious about us. :-) Jeff and I both had a wonderful time, and I feel even more excited about moving into the house next month. We lingered until the party broke up; it was SO hard leaving the house and driving back downtown.

The whole neighbourhood community thing is a new experience for us; in our condo, everyone stayed mostly to themselves, exchanging the occasional greetings in elevators but that was about it. There were notices about social gatherings from time to time, but we generally didn't attend these.

Part of me regrets this now, but I found the atmosphere different in an apartment complex...when you're in very close proximity to your neighbours on almost all sides, you don't necessarily want to get to know them really well. Part of it is a defense mechanism, I'm sure; if conflicts develop or if you find you don't get along for some other reason, it could become awkward...you'll inevitably run into them in the hallway and elevators.

Jeff and Mark.

In a residential community, however, I can see some of the advantages of getting to know your neighbours. You can look out for each other, help each other out on occasion, share useful information. If your kids play together, then it makes even more sense to get to know the other family.

A survey:
1. Do you know the names of your immediate neighbours? (yes/no)
2. How often do you interact with them?
3. Do you participate in your neighbourhood community?

My new office is painted! Many thanks to Ray and Mark for helping out. I decided to go with an off-white colour after my paint colour failure earlier (the pale yellow that looked so harmless on the paint chip but that mutated into an alien exploded brain hue on the wall). I actually wanted to opt for a pure white to be safe, but Jeff and others convinced me to go for a slight tinge of colour. I'm now paranoid about yellow so opted for a bit of red. And I mean a BIT.

Watching the paint being mixed at Home Depot was interesting: the paint technician basically took a big can of white paint, stuck it under a machine, pressed some buttons, and a miniscule squirt of red came out. Jeff claims that the paint is still just white, but I'm insisting that it's actually an off-white. The paint chip had a boring colour name (numbers and letters) so I've come up with a more imaginative one: "Invisible Rose In Winter." Yep, that's the colour of my office wall.

Anyway, I decided to paint my office door off-white, inside and out, because I want to use it as a blank canvas. For what, exactly, I'm not sure yet. But it's sure to be interesting. I also bought a small can of glow-in-the-dark paint because I want stars on my ceiling. :-)

My carpet goes in on Wednesday!



Thanks to David Barker for letting me know that Ruth and her books were mentioned on CityTV's Breakfast Television last week. I was also amused by his last comment: "Hey, not only do I know two people who are famous, but I know their sisters as well. How lucky am I?"

:-D

Hey, speaking of Ruth...her newest book, Bottled Sunshine, will soon be available! Author: Andrea Spalding, illustrated by Ruth.



And a last Saskatoon berry bush comment: I've decided to let the birds have the Saskatoon berries this year. Too much going on to try harvesting enough for baking. I went out and counted the bushes: we have THREE Saskatoon berry bushes! I might try covering two of them with netting next year to let the berries ripen enough for my own use, and let the birds have one.

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Saskatoon berry pie

Dandelion at Niagara-on-the-Lake

Some of your postings yesterday have definitely inspired me to try baking a Saskatoon berry pie or tartlets (Kristen suggested with whipped cream, yum), if I can harvest the berries before the birds. Might be tricky this year, though, since the berries are likely going to fully ripen before Jeff and I move in (Graham says I should wait until the berries turn blue or purple), which means the birds will probably be feasting before then.

Don't know if I'd attempt the pastry crust from scratch, though. The last time I tried making pie pastry was a disaster. I served the pie to Jeff's sister shortly after we had met for the first time, wasn't my sister-in-law yet.

ME (nervous): "I think the crust might be a bit tough."

LARKIN: "Oh no, I'm sure it's fine, Debbie."

(Larkin struggles to cut her piece with a fork. Struggles very hard. The fork BENDS, unable to pierce the teflon-like material that is my pie crust.)

LARKIN: "Um, well, maybe it's a LITTLE tough..."

Sara fishing off the cottage dock last year.

This weekend, Jeff and Ray and I are going to paint my office. Then next week, my office gets a carpet! VERY hyped about this. Our storage locker isn't being unloaded into the house until the middle of next month when renovations are complete so I still won't be able to really use my office yet, but at least I can sit on the floor with my laptop and think happythoughts. :-)

Sent out a query about an article about the Northern Lights yesterday, got a go-ahead from the editor by the end of the day. I also think I may have sold my first gardening cartoon!

Got my Stokes, Richters and Veseys catalogs recently, woohoo! I've already started drooling over the Jiffy pots and grow lights and jaw-dropping number of interesting herbs and vegetables and flowers that could be growing in my garden next year. If I had a garden the size of the Northwest Territories, that is.

This year, I'm exerting enormous restraint and only planting a few herbs while I acquaint myself with our new garden. You can see pictures of all the plants I've managed to identify with the help of some of you, the previous owner, and the wonderful community at YouGrowGirl.com in this Flickr photo set.

Doing gardenstuff today, in fact. Ruth's sharing some of her groundcover plants and we're also visiting a nearby garden nursery so I can browse and get some fertilizer.

Had a nice evening yesterday. Jeff came home at an unprecedented hour (6 pm!) and we strolled along the lakefront, had dinner at a restaurant with outdoor patio, then visited GameTrek at the Royal York.

Sunrise at the cottage

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tiny Ray

Happy Father's Day to you dads out there!

My friend Ray called me while he was waiting for a train this afternoon. I took a picture of him out of my mom-in-law's condo window. You can see a zoomed-in photo here.

Karin & Scott's wedding photo.

Hung out at the new house for a bit with Jeff and Ray yesterday morning to talk with Sean about renovation stuff. Renovation work is going well and on time, yay! Much of the first floor has been repainted, the new tub has been installed.

The movers are scheduled to bring our stuff out of storage in about a month. A month seems like forever to me right now; I am SO excited about being able to finally move in and get settled. To not have to commute for an hour to get to our place just to look at the garden. To have the house to ourselves. To be able to move into MY NEW OFFICE.

But I digress. During our visit yesterday, I had the check out the garden, of course, and was delighted to find the mock orange tree blooming outside our kitchen window:



And hey, I hadn't realized that hostas had flowers:

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I am immensely grateful to those of you who have been e-mailing or posting as well as the community at YouGrowGirl.com for helping me identify the various plants in our new garden! I still feel pretty clueless, but not QUITE as clueless as before.

There were lots of bumblebees flitting about our hardy geraniums. Check out this very cool close-up of a bumblebee in our garden that Ray took. He and I sat and watched the bumblebees for a bit; it was fascinating to watch them up close, sticking their tongues into the centre of each flower, soaking up nectar. I was curious enough to look up the anatomy of a bumbleebee when I got home.

I also wished I had paid more attention in grade school when we learned about flower pollination. I found myself wondering what happened to flowers that aren't pollinated, that happen to be missed for whatever reason. Does it just mean that the seeds from that flower won't germinate? I feel so ignorant. From this simple explanation, though, it does look as if there's no pollen, the plant won't progress in a way to allow propagation.

Later in the day, Jeff and I went to a post-wedding get-together held by Karin and Scott, who were married in Cuba earlier this year.

Here's Karin's dress, which she made herself for $40 (!):



She also made her own headpiece (see photo at top) out of earrings.

I like this photo of Reid:



Reid used my camera to take this photo of Luisa and me:



Vartan makes drinks behind the bar:



You can see some of the other photos in my Flickr photo set.

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survey: practical and decadent purchases

Our peonies are blooming!

Thanks for the paint suggestions, everyone; I realize now I should have gotten a SMALL paint sample and tried it on the wall first, duh. Because my carpet won't be installed until the end of this month, I might hold off on choosing a paint until next month. Or I might just go with plain white.

Look how happy this woman is with her Hook'n'Go!

My most recent useful purchase was the Hook'n'Go Shopping Bag Caddy. Can't believe I didn't get this years ago, but then again perhaps it wasn't available years ago; I found out about it recently from my friend Cathy. I used to use Grocery Gateway, on online grocery shopping service, but I find that I really enjoy grocery shopping in person.

Yes, I admit it...I actually do ENJOY grocery shopping, browsing the fresh produce area, snooping through the ethnic food ingredients aisle. Since I don't drive, I'm limited in how much I can carry, especially so since the whole tendinitis thing began. I used to have a regular shopping cart but I found it too bulky, and my bags of groceries got squished because I had to pile them on top of each other.

My new Hook'n'Go caddy can carry up to 70 lb of groceries, and folds up. I can pull it behind me (I prefer this) or push it in front like a normal shopping cart. I've used it twice so far and love it. Each time, at least one person has asked me where I got it.

And it's a heckuva lot easier on my tendons and shoulder muscles than lugging stuff around in a backpack and by hand. If you're interested in checking it out, here's the page from Hedonics (picking it up in person will save you the shipping cost). It's also available from Hammacher-Schlemmer (sp?), but it's more expensive.



My most recent decadent purchase is lavender-olive hand soap: Savon de Marseille Extra Pur Olive Lavande. I've been wanting some ever since first trying it years ago, saw it for sale for the first time in a tablecloth shop (!) in Niagara-on-the-Lake a couple of weeks ago.

The fragrance is heavenly and my hands never feel too dry after using it, as is often the case with other soaps. Every time I use it, I feel like I'm being pampered. The sensual and emotional pleasure I get each time makes it so worth the extra money, at least for me. The awareness that I will likely only buy this once a year makes it that much more special.

Ok, now your turn...

Survey:

What was your most recent useful purchase?
What was your most recent decadent purchase? (doesn't have to involve a lot of money, but needs to be something purchased more for pleasure than practicality)

Some garden pics...

Cranesbill (aka Hardy Geranium):



Clematis (not sure what kind):



Another type of clematis :



Pink flowers have appeared at the end of our tamarisk tree branches:



We thought the tree below was dead. Jeff cut it off near the base, was about to pull it out completely, noticed a couple small leaves near ground level, decided to leave it to see what happened. Looks like it's coming back to life...



My new oregano plant:

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