Home for a rest

I was going to post something long and involved, but Twitters gave me permission to post "cop out" posts tonight. So, instead, look at the pretty water.

Home

Finals are done (I passed, I passed!) and I'm back on the island for a few days. Kim and I took her dogs out to Uplands park and enjoyed one of the rare sunny moments. Garry Oak meadows like these are what the south island would look like (in between the patches of temperate rain forest) if humans had left it alone. It's too bad I'm not here about two weeks from now because the Camas is about to pop and the meadows would look like something from a fairy tale. Ah well, still beautiful!


Sol being a doof.



"Choose your path wisely...."



Not sure what they were excited about here....



Ah, Home.

Ah, Victoria

I love going home.

I did, in fact, make it back to the island for Christmas and I was only 2 days late. I managed a full 6 days of family, friends, sushi, presents, ocean, dogs, sleep, and copious amounts of sugar. I came home 2 days ago and I'm feeling great.

So, Happy New Year all! I'm spending the night with the cats and a movie and I can't think of a better way to kick off 2009. Cheers!



(Darth Fiddler is a common sight in Victoria. Under the mask, he's actually a pretty cool guy. Too bad he can't actually play the damn fiddle.)

We gotta get out of this place.....

Well, I'm stuck.

I was supposed to fly out of PDX at 3pm today, but here I am, sitting in Rob's apartment. I can't get to the airport (they shut down MAX for most of today) and my flight has been canceled twice even if I could. I also can't get back to my apartment where my cats are. They should be fine because I left them a week's worth of food, 3 water bowls (in case Minnow digs all the water out of them like she usually does) a pot of water in the sink with the tap dripping into it and the heat on low.

The problem is, even though I know they should be just fine, I worry. I can't help but think about all the what ifs, and those what ifs are scary. Merlin isn't the healthiest creature around, what if he chooses now to get really sick? What if Minnow falls off something for the one billionth time, and this time actually hurts herself? What if, what if, what if....

I'm going to try to get out there tomorrow (multiple friends with Subarus, rock on!) and check on them, but otherwise I'll just have to sit here and quietly panic.

My current flight schedule has me leaving PDX at 6am on Tuesday (ewwwwwwww!) and arriving at YVR at 7am. Then, due to some absolutely stellar scheduling, I get to wait til 4:30pm to catch the island hopper back home. I felt kinda sorry for the Air Canada employee who had to tell me this because it was obvious he expected me to start yelling and screaming (which he'd probably already got a lot of that day). I told him it wasn't his fault, and really....how bad is it? I mean, it's not like I have to sit outside in the snow and wait for my plane. YVR isn't half bad, as airports go, and I have 3 knitting projects, a couple books, and goldfish crackers. I suspect I'll survive and it'll become just one more "do you remember when...?" tale I can drag out at Christmas time. I plan to stick near to the gate anyway, and if I'm really lucky, a seat will open up on an earlier flight. I'm actually far less concerned about the day waiting at YVR and more annoyed by having to be at PDX for 6am. I mean, really. I'll probably just not sleep and head out around 3am, because looking at the clock right now (2:30am) I think I'll have better luck with that. Mom, if you're reading this, be prepared to accept delivery of a slightly frozen zombie. I may or may not be coherent, but I'll do my best.

So, keep your fingers crossed for me. I really do want to go home!

Foot Loose and Fancy Free?

Ok, I'll admit it. That is a truly terrible pun (though not as bad as some on boingboing's article)

"RICHMOND, B.C. — A couple walking their dogs along the banks of British Columbia's Fraser River made the latest in what's become a series of gruesome discoveries of a running shoe with a severed foot encased inside.

It's the seventh such find inside a shoe along the West Coast from Georgia Strait to the northwestern tip of Washington State since August 2007."

This is a map of the area where the feet are being found.

If this finding is confirmed as real, that makes seven feet that have washed up in the area. When you consider how much of the BC coastline is uninhabited and how many wild animals there are who would be willing to cart off something like this before humans found it, the idea that we've found seven is a little worrying. How many more feet are washing up that nobody knows about? And more importantly, where in the world are they coming from?

A lot of theories have been put forth: small plane crash victims, an (unreported?) boating acident in the Fraser, missing fishermen or sailors, Serial Killer, or even the far-fetched Tsunami victims.

The similarity of all the feet being in running shoes can be explained by the tendency of running shoes to be well attached to the feet by laces and by their floating capability. A foot in say, a high heel, would slide out of the shoe, and a boot would likely not float. It is also considered normal for body parts to disarticulate during decomposition - the ligaments holding the limbs weaken and parts simply break off. This would be even more likely in an ocean environment where the currents would buffet the body slightly. Other body parts (hands, etc) might also disarticulate, but without a buoyant accessory like a shoe, they would be less likely to float to the surface.

So, that can all explain *how* the shoes end up on the beaches, but the why and where are still a little confusing. If this were the norm - bodies lost into the ocean returning feet to land - why haven't feet been found before this? Why now?

and just so you're aware...I was planning to end this post on a particularly bad foot pun. Consider yourselves lucky that I refrained!

Klee Wyck

It's a little unfortunate that most Victorians think only of the annoying whale mascot from the 1994 commonwealth games when they hear the name "Klee Wyck", because the real "Klee Wyck" was Emily Carr. It was a name given to her by the natives of Ucluelet and it means "laughing one". I'd guess that the whale mascot was intended as a nod to her, but the gesture fell a little flat.

I've loved Emily Carr's paintings since the first time I saw them. One of my old babysitters did work with the Victoria Art Gallery and she took my sister and I there once to see the exhibits. I had thought I liked art, but I found that most of what was on display didn't interest me at all. I thought a lot of the art was boring, some of it not really art at all, and a lot of it just blurred together in the sheer number of paintings I was seeing all at once. It wasn't until I walked into the Carr exhibit that I actually started to think that perhaps I could appreciate art after all.

Looking back, I have a tough time remembering exactly what struck me first about her paintings, but I know what strikes me as I see her work now. Her brush strokes were decisive and strong, her colours bold and somehow realistic, even when they weren't true to life. More than that though, it was her subjects. I knew the landscapes she painted, I'd seen totem poles and cedars, and I loved them. The way I felt when I saw treetops stretching up to the sky was the way I felt when I saw a painting she'd done of it.



It wasn't until much later (after I'd already moved into my own apartment and put three of her prints on my walls) that I thought to actually learn about her as a person. Oh, I'd known that she'd lived in Victoria and was considered ahead of her time, I'd walked past "Carr House" many times, but I think I had somehow felt that I didn't want to risk spoiling her paintings by finding out that the person behind them wasn't as wonderful as those works suggested.

I shouldn't have worried. I was poking around the museum gift shop with some visiting family when I noticed a book titled "Klee Wyck". I picked it up and was shocked to discover that Emily Carr hadn't just been a painter, she'd been a writer. I bought the book, took it home and devoured it. I couldn't believe that the emotions of her paintings could be distilled into words, but she had done it. I've since read three more of her books (and I'm working on a fourth) and I love them.

Emily was best described as an eccentric. She was a female artist who traveled the world in a time when women were expected to stay home. She studied art in the wicked city of San Francisco, spent time in an English sanatorium for "hysteria" and explored the remote and largely abandoned native villages of BC's west coast. She was stubborn and impatient and she saw the world through very different eyes. In her later years, she kept all the chairs in her studio winched up on ropes attached to the ceiling. When visitors called she would leave them standing until she decided if they were worth her time or not. If she liked you, she'd lower a chair.

Emily Carr summed up her approach to writing and painting very simply: "I did not know book rules. I made two for myself. They were about the same as the principles I use in painting--get to the point as directly as you can; never use a big word if a little one will do."

I've taken a couple of excerpts from the stories of Klee Wyck. If you should go looking for the book to read it yourself, make sure you find the newer edition. The older edition was edited for mass consumption in schools and quite a bit of it was made politically correct or removed entirely.

On totems:
"They were in a long straggling row the entire length of the bay and pointed this way and that; but no matter how drunken their tilt, the Haida poles never lost their dignity. They looked sadder, perhaps, when they bowed forward and more stern when they tipped back. They were bleached to a pinkish silver colour and cracked by the sun, but nothing could make them mean or poor, because the Indians had put strong thought into them and had believed sincerely in what they were trying to express."


"At five o'clock that July morning the sea, sky, and beach of Skidegate were rosily smoothed into one. There was neither horizon, cloud, nor sound; of that pink, spread silence even I had become part, belonging as much to sky as to earth, as much to sleeping as waking as I went stumbling over the Skidegate sands."

And this, which is probably my favourite passage:

"As the canoe glided on, her human cargo was as silent as the cedar-life that once had filled her. She had done with the forest now; when they shoved her into the sea they had dug out her heart. Submissively she accepted the new element, going with the tide. When tide or wind crossed her she became fractious. Some still element of the forest clung yet to the cedar's hollow rind which resented the restless push of waves."

Horses, Bean Salads and Best Friends

I've spent most of my spare time over the past few days studying, and I decided to take a break today and go groom Dave. Something about the smell of horses just calms me down, and Dave is great to talk to when stressed. He listens quite nicely, leans into the curry brush, and half closes his eyes and sighs when you start on him with the dandy brush. Best of all, once you're done, he turns around and just rests his nose against your chest and breathes. It makes me feel like all really could be right with the world.
Of course, spending time with horses usually leads me to thinking about my best friend back home.

Twitters (the nickname I saddled her with when I was about 12) and I have known each other for around 15 years now. We both went to the same school (though she was a grade behind me) and our little sisters had met and become friends. On one of their play-dates, we happened to start talking and realised that not only were we both horse crazy, we were both just a little bit crazy, period. I can't remember the first time we hung out together, and I can't remember when I first started thinking of Twitters as my best friend, but I do remember how much fun we've had.

There was the treefort incident, where we painted the inside and then leaned over the wet paint to do the outside (somewhere there's a really charming picture of us coated in brown paint), and the time I fell into the giant ditch in their front yard. There were the frantic mornings when I'd wake up to see snow outside, as well as a neat row of snowballs on our fencepost, signaling her already prepared ambush. After the ambush, we would sled down the hill at the end of the street, towed by her dog, BJ. There were the endless summers of swimming at the lake, eating salmonberries and dumping each other off the converted surfboard we'd paddle like a canoe. There was the time we figured out we could see each other from our kitchen windows if the trees weren't in bloom, the light was just right, and we jumped up and down waving like crazy.

Best of all though was the horse stuff. We took a riding camp together one summer, and we are still talking about that one week as if it were yesterday. On our third day at the camp my horse tried to take a jump without my consent and I fell off. When I managed to get back on my feet, Twitters was right there. "You went into a perfect three point position before you fell!" she cried. "Really?!" I said, "Cool!!"

We spent hours creating our dream stables using her extensive collection of toy horses. We would build miniature dioramas on her front lawn while having serious discussions over the amount of necessary shade, spacing and types of feed we would use. We'd grab all the free horse magazines from the tack shop and then pore through them and call all the ads for free stuff. Free leg wrap samples, complimentary product guides, more free horse magazines. We didn't really need any of it, just as I didn't really need the hoof pick she gave me as a present one year, but that didn't mean I loved any of it less. I still have the hoof pick.

When we were teenagers, we both got a job at the local petting zoo. The owner couldn't tell us apart, not because we looked similar, but because what one knew, the other knew too. Any job or task I was capable of, so was she, and as far as staffing was concerned, we were pretty well interchangeable. We were dubbed "Weiner" and "Turkey" (though who was which varied) and often simply referred to as "Double Trouble". We transferred our horse obsession (which was sorely lacking in real, live horses to feed it) to the goats at the farm, and soon became the goat goddesses. We could name any of the 30-odd goats, name their siblings, mothers, and how old they were at a glance. When the goats were stampeded up to their barn at night and needed to be separated back into their individual family units, we were the best. Goat sorting could take 20-30 minutes for most people, but we could do it in 10. We were (and still are, I think) quite proud of this.

A few months before I moved away Twitters invited me over for lunch. She's an amazing cook, so I was excited when she said she was making something special that she wanted to teach me. It turned out to be a fantastic bean salad that even I couldn't mess up, and I've made it at least every month since I've moved. I made it today, right after I got home from grooming the horse, and all of it has made me miss her a lot.
So, Thank you Twitters! For sharing my animal obsession, for the bean salad recipe, and most of all for being my best friend.


Twitters' Bean Salad
(I've slightly adjusted the original ingredients, but that's the magic of this salad...just add what you want, leave out what you don't!)
1 can wax beans
1 can green beans
1 can chick peas
1 can baby corncobs
1 can black beans
1 can kidney beans
1 tomato, chopped
1 red onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, coarsely chopped

mayo
olive oil
balsamic vinegar
pepper
cumin (lots!)
cilantro, coarsely chopped


Chop onion and place in a small container with some balsamic vinegar. Shake well and let sit for an hour or so to take some of the bitterness out of the onion.
Drain the canned ingredients and rinse well under cool water to remove excess canning water. Pour into large bowl and stir gently. Add onion.
In a smaller bowl, mix together mayo, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, pepper and cumin. This part is to taste, and you want to have enough to cover all of the beans without making it too sloppy.
Pour the dressing into the bean mixture, stirring til entirely covered. Add tomato and cilantro. Serve.

Cowichan Sweaters

I found this picture ages ago, and I really wish I'd written down the site I got it from. Extensive google searching has left me empty handed, but should anyone know where it is from I would like to credit it, because I love this photo.
I love her outfit, and the expression on her face. I love that the Butter Church is in the background. Most of all though, I love the Cowichan Sweater she's knitting. I am such a sucker for those things, and one day I hope I'll have enough skill (and money for materials!) to make one.
Cowichan Sweaters originated around the mid 1800's when European settlers began arriving in the Cowichan Valley area. The natives had been weaving various types of fibres for generations before that, so they quickly learned and adapted the art of knitting to their own style. The sweaters became very popular, and still are today.

Before I left for Portland, Dad gave me a Cowichan Sweater for Christmas, and I love it. The designs on the sweaters are beautiful, the knit-work is amazing, and when properly cared for, the sweaters will shed rain quite nicely. How perfect for the Pacific North-Wet? (no, that isn't a typo...)

Still sick today, and I was actually much worse earlier. I had a fever most of last night and this morning, so I ended up missing class. I hated to do it, but I emailed the instructor and got the homework assignment so I won't fall behind. It sounds like I didn't miss much in lecture or lab (which is a relief), and I'm not sure I would have been able to absorb much were I there anyway. I slept til almost 3pm and then napped on and off for the rest of the evening. Blech!

Speaking of sleep, I think it may be bedtime!