back to school

it's fascinating - so much going on at work, so many people feeling so serious about such... serious stuff. and zev is off to grade four. which is the most serious thing for him. homework for the first time; he gets a little buddy in kindergarten or grade one to take care of (he's been looking forward to this since grade one). he's not sure that a "character" lunchbox will do; it needs to be a "grade four" sort of lunchbox. superman isn't cool enough anymore. something sort of navy blue and with no pictures on it. and a water bottle.

and amanda is in her graduating year - photos to be taken, yearbook momentos to write... dances to plan and hair and makeup and a dress and shoes and a little sparkly purse. and gary is back to work, for the first time in a long while working outside the home on a schedule (rather than a workshop here, a tutoring session there). changes and changes.

garden 2

what i was going to say was that we have spent the whole week prepping the garden for our little party - gary and mishel helped clear the apples off the tree (though they're still falling), andrew came and cut the lawn, amanda did a great job cleaning the lawn furniture, davyd weeded a bed of roses... gary helped with everything i asked him too, which was wonderful. so it all looked very nice and was, for maybe the first time since we moved here, sort of the garden i've wanted to have. i think i want more - a big pond, a cobbled patio, all that stuff... but this was good. for most of my adult life gardening has been so important, has been the first and last thing - it's where any extra money i had went, where my energy went... it's the place i could write about, be in... a bit obsessive. and i was alone there. i invited people in, but only when i wanted them to and it was always an occasion. this garden, like my life, seems to be about the community - the extended family that we've made. and that obsessive alone-garden hasn't been true for a long time. part of that is being with gary - gardening, not matter how active, is a passive sport. it's a lot about waiting. gary is all about action - doing things... jumping in and living bigger. it's been great. i wonder if i'm on my way to making a garden that expresses that?

garden

yesterday we had a barbecue for gary b - a belated birthday party - really nice friends, great ribs, wonderful salads and of course (zev's choice for uncle gary) a chocolate cake with chocolate icing and chocolate ice cream with chunks of chocolate in it. i'm not sure i'll ever have a chocolate craving again but the kids loved it. gary b loved it... nice to spend some time with him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QHEFKoexSU

old friends

nice to spend some time with R and M tonight; R and i have been friends for 28 years... wow. been through so much together - college, real estate, marriage(s), kids, parents getting older, homeopathy college, grandparents dying, different courses on spiritual growth... she taught me how to type; one of the best things i've ever learned. one of the things i am really liking about growing older is this sense of personal evolution. a bunch of things that used to be important, no longer are. and the same with my friends, of a certain age. and equally a bunch of things that used to seem silly, are now important and worthy of attention. she's just been on a retreat where there was 2 days of silence; i've just learned how to play chords on the guitar. i sound like crap; she snuck into the bathroom and phoned home on her cell. and we're doing fine... still growing.

You're out of the woods You're out of the dark You're out of the night Step into the sun, step into the light Keep straight ahead For the most glorious place On the Face of the Earth Or the sky Hold onto your breath Hold onto your heart Hold onto your hope March up to the gate And bid it open

i think this is the best photo i took of our day at the parade...

elaine paige

after a long day of apple picking and sorting and drying (finally got out the food dehydrator) and making fruit leather and apple-ginger chutney and applesauce and cleaning up the kitchen several times but not quite getting to the box of peaches a friend dropped off (that will be wonderful pies) gary and i are listening to elaine paige interviewing cameron macintosh and they are listening to great broadway songs... nice end to a nice day.

here is a photo of gary, zev and i at vancouver pride festival. it was the first year he's stayed awake for it - we haven't taken him since he was about three and it was, then, a bit of overdrive for his senses and he fell asleep and then got a sunburn... it hasn't seem worthwhile to go down until lately. he loved all the family oriented parade entries (insists next year he's going to be in it, throwing candy or beads) and took some great photos of dogs and gay families :)

“When you don't choose the same old way, the same old stale story line, then there's the opportunity for something new and fresh to present itself to you. The world can open up in an unprecedented way.” Pema Chodron, “A Substitute Life.”

more apples and a rainbow

the kids are both away for the night - amanda for the weekend, zev to his grandma's... i've been making more pies. :::sigh::: it occurred to me that our elderly neighbours might like one and when i called they said they don't eat much so wouldn't take a pie but are feeling badly as they've got a bumper crop themselves, so could we come and harvest theirs and take them away? yikes. just when i was seeing the horizon and imagining a day without apples.

gary and i got to go downtown, wander around, buy some new hats, have a nice dinner, get some coffee at chapters and look at magazines and then coming home there was this amazing rainbow - later on the drive the centre of the rainbow sort of disappeared and then there were two arcs, one on either side of us, one pastel and one technicolour...

a surfeit of apples

the apple tree in our backyard - long infected with blackrot, gnarly and crooked - has decided to throw a bumper crop this year; one branch of it even turns out to be a whole different kind of apple, grafted on to the bigger tree. i'm not sure what to think - i started pruning it when we moved here five years ago and last year didn't get around to it... and like a lot of stuff in the garden it seem to be doing much better without my help. hmmm...

anyway, so many apples... hard to know what to do with them all. i've made 8 pies now, a couple of apple crisps and have a crockpot of apples cooking into spicy apple butter. here's a photo of one of the pies - this one is a dutch apple pie. i'm using my "best of..." recipe - from the american test kitchen and am looking forward to tasting it. you cook the crust, then cook the apples down with dried fruit (cranberries and golden raisins) and then you drain the juice from the apples and cook it down with whipping cream and pour it over the top and then add a streusil topping that has cornmeal in it. so, a bunch of my favourite things all put together.

and now i have to go practise my guitar. i found a cool new website http://www.guitarnoise.com/ which is handy given that i had to miss my guitar lesson this afternoon... zev was asking how much longer i'll have to study for. i have 9 years and 9 months before i decide if i'm not cut out for playing!

cher

when turning 50, Cher is a great role model, maybe. i heard that she's getting ready to pose nude for playboy for her 60th birthday. in hawaii. i'd like the hawaii part. it's been interesting to think over the last year of role models on how to age well... there's so much terror for so many people. i've been doing this envisioning work around the next decade, two decades, three decades... plus. someone who mentors me says that only by having a vision of a future that exceeds the past can one move forward; this, he says, is the reason so many people die after they retire... not sure if he's right about that. people say the darnedest things. someone, when i was very sick and scared, told me that it couldn't possibly be my time to pass away - i hadn't yet found my true purpose or expressed all i had to express. i thought of all the people, children, young people... so many people who don't get to express what they are, who don't get to find their purpose. in ft. lauderdale the other day a young black gay man, dressed as a woman, in an area of drag prostitutes, was shot in the head and killed. he was 17 and had just passed his GED exam so that he could go take a cooking course and become a chef. i googled his name and found a photo of him - so beautiful. his drag name was Beyonce.

and then there's cher - reportedly one of the world's nicest and unassuming people. after so many interviewers had asked her about plastic surgeries she finally made one single comment: "getting old is hard work."

Quitting smoking

this is me in my http://www.threadless.com/ "more reasons not to go camping" t-shirt, feeding Rufus his third birthday kibbles-cake.

earlier, i was thinking about writing about relationships for a project i've been working on and wrote about New York instead... here, i was going to write about quitting smoking... i better resist writing about Rufus, the Irish Terrier Little Brother...

after so many attempts to quit smoking and then this sort of sustained 8 months of trying to stop or at least cut down hugely, i seem to have stopped. and i'm not crazy or even cranky. i am a little bored but oh well. i went to a great hypnotherapist for an initial appointment and have been listening to her cd every night... the one night that i forgot, i did have a bit of trouble the next day. but, as she says in her cd, "this is so simple, it is so incredibly easy - all you're doing is letting go of something that you no longer want in your life." so that's been pretty exciting and fun and i have great faith in the process... it really has been incredibly easy. i think it was just time to let go of it.