beautiful delicate florets of tasty

look what we made! it is a cauliflower. so delicious we ate about half raw before we could get it on the barbie.

i have work and knitting and gardening and not enough sleep. it is excellent except i should do more phd reading. poo to you, foucault!

island hopping

another flying trip to the island, this time to victoria to check out the treasures exhibition at the musuem. i took my bike and did the 30k from the ferry terminal down to the city of victoria. it was a beautiful ride, very flat and well signposted, through bush, farmland, suburb and seascape. the sun was shining, there were bald eagles circling lazily in the blue sky, and cute deer eating other people's gardens:


the exhibit was pretty good. they'd got a bunch of stuff from the british museum, and it was arranged chronologically and by continent. there was an egyptian mummy and some roman sculptures, and neat cuneiform tablets. the oceania section was very small, and didn't have any papua new guinean artifacts from my childhood. boo!

i enjoyed remembering the history i've learnt, and thinking about my trip to italy. i'd forgotten what bastards the british museum are about returning aboriginal bodies and so forth, though, and the colonial politics of the exhibition were disturbing. all civilisations were gradually working towards western culture?

you can find out more about the exhibition here: http://www.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/Treasures/

i also checked out more of the permanent exhibits. the indigenous totem poles were unexpectedly confronting. they're so big and intimidating? threatening? something like that. beautiful, as well, but in an uneasy way. i suppose that's what they were intended to do - draw you in, but point out how small you are. welcome to my village!


and with some humans, for scale:


there's also a sweet fossil exhibit. this mastodon tooth was found on vancouver island. can you imagine an animal this big stomping round here? (um, the tooth was about a foot long.)


it was the first time i'd spent canada day in the province's capital. there were a bazillion tourists everywhere, mostly loud americans wearing maple leaf tattoos on their cheeks, complaining about not being able to use US money in cafes.

to celebrate canada day i experienced the parliament buildings (vis. lay under a tree and read):


and got to know some of the locals:

(cougar)


(grizzly bear hiding up the back)

actually, i realised that i'd bought clothes from local designers and books by local authors, and was eating some denman island chocolate, not so much from patriotic reasons, but ecological and ethical. but still!

it was a very pleasant few days pottering around, enjoying the sunshine and not doing much. i visited my favourite gumtree, sat underneath it and read.

i forgot how messy gumtrees are! also that smell. oh, i miss eucalyptus forests.

then i biked back up to the ferry and began the long trip home.

(i am my father's daughter . . . )

a day in the life 2

alarm clock! oh noes!

i've got into the habit of taking my coffee into the garden in the mornings; pottering round the tomato plants eases the pain of waking up.

sometimes i get too distracted, though. this morning i had to book it to work. here's my "riding fast" face:


here's part of my commute (not that i stopped to take photos when i was running late):


it was a kind of cold and rainy day, strange after a few weeks of lovely vancouver summer sunshine.



i got to work not too too late.

our first job of every day is too hang all the display bikes out front and lock them up. we have to do this while beating off the customers, who don't appreciate that we physically can't fit them in the shop til all the outside bikes are out!


after that it was life as usual.


cos it was a bit cold and wet the shop was pretty quiet. i spent some time in the bat cave, restocking the tubes and rearranging the locks.


brake pads confuse the hell out of me!


i also spent some time hanging out back with the mechanics, because they are cool.


the tools one needs to assemble this bike.

(a mallet isn't one of them)


i spent my lunch break right there, under that tree.


that's leftover pizza from my dinner party the night before. it was the first time i'd tried cornflour in the dough. an excellent choice.

i'm reading a book by jane rule, who was this local lesbian activist type who academics keep mentioning. the novel isn't doing it for me so much, i have to admit, but i'm ploughing on.

i also contemplated buying new boots. do i look unprofessional? or kind of DIY-biker-hard-core?


business stepped up a bit in the afternoon, selling bikes and helmets and so forth. working with customers on these things is an oddly intimate experience. i spend a lot of time staring at people's earlobes, and the sides of their knees.



i also spend a lot of time removing pedals and turning handlebars, so we can file the bikes without mashing them up. i'm a dab hand with a pedal wrench and tri-al.



these run bikes are a real hit with the under-4 set. they're tiny bikes without pedals, the idea being that the kid learns balance on them and then can go straight to pedalling a bigger bike without training wheels.


it was about this time that we heard the news about wacko jacko, and cranked the stereo in sympathy.

i ducked out to get a cup of coffee in the afternoon. it was sweet to get a break from being nice to people. on the whole, our customers are fabulous hippie, punk, DIY, queer, friendly types, and the staff likewise, but a girl needs some alone time sometimes.


there i am, back hard at work.


at the end of the day we pull all the bikes and stack them inside again. it's how i get my biceps, baby.


i spent some time hanging round w a mechanic friend after we closed the shop. we discussed our unicycling experience. i wasn't so good at stilt-walking at circus, but i can ride a mini-bike okay. the mechanic learnt when he was a kid, but has been too scared to try as an adult.



then i biked over to kate reid's album launch. she's another local dyke-y type who writes very entertaining songs. she sung "co-op gurlz", my favourite song of her's, and a bunch of stuff from her new album. (kate, incidentally, tried to buy my shop shirt off my back when i was working last summer. dyke-chic?)

it was a sweet gig, but i was pretty wiped by the end. long day on my feet!


safety first when biking home after dark, especially after beer!



when i got home mr fix-it and i knitted and watched the X-files.


we saw an entertaining episode with mulder and scully running around in lighthouse park (where we biked to last summer) claiming to be hunting weird alien bugs in washington DC.



then a little reading,

then hand-cream and arnica balm (see above re. biceps), then sleep.

aunty beryll says goodnight!

we'll have lots to eat this winter

grow your own



spring onions in beer bottles and bubble tea cups (the beer is le fin du monde!)



salad greens, to make into salad:



can your own


eleanor and i biked thirty k out to ladner and picked strawberries for a couple of hours, loading them all up in yoghurt containers in our panniers for the trip back.


we froze half of them, and canned the other half. now we have strawberries for winter!


eleanor also cracked it one day and announcing she was quitting all her activist positions and staying home and making all our bread, cheese and yoghurt. so we joined a cow co-op (we're still on the waiting list - i'll tell you more when the milk appears) and ordered a bit of flour and grains:


her bread is delicious:


we also made lemon tart one day:


(and here's some cake from a 60th bday cass and i went to last week, which i neither grew nor made, but am very fond of anyways:

)

not quite straight

i have curly hair! or bits of curly hair - my random long bits are sort of turning into ringlets.

my hairdresser (of fabulousness) suggested this divergence from my always-dead-straight hair might be due to vancouver's damp climate.

reckon i should grow my hair out over winter and see what it looks like?

outdoor plants

the outside garden is still a source of joy.


the east bed has strawberries along the edge, massive amounts of salad greens up the back there, spring onions and garlic off to the left, various herbs, and root veggies in the middle-ish. it also has the poor sad tomato plants, which have repaid all my careful nurturing with lack-lustre growth:


(the wire is to stop the neighbourhood cats from pooing in the garden - they dig up plants when they scratch.)


the western bed has upstairs-neighbour-S's flowers, and the cauliflowers.


there's also broccoli, nasturtiums, the peas climbing up the bed-frame against the fence, corn that a random woman across the alley gave us, capsicums (grown from dinner!), cucumbers, potatoes, swiss chard and about a million zombie-squash plants which came out of the compost.

the five of us (three in my household, two upstairs) started out planning the beds so carefully, with tall plants up the back, and some companion planting rules in play (tomatoes and basil! broccoli and thyme!). then we got into it, and now there's random stuff everywhere. we also discovered that you can dig random holes in the gravel and just shove stuff in. look! artichokes!


there's also a rhubarb plant up the back, near the compost bin.


here's roomie-M's raspberry patch. we found out that garlic and raspberries grow well together, so we put some garlic cloves in there too, and they're doing fine. (also a zombie-squash.)


we also planted some lemon seeds one time when we were making lemon and poppyseed cake. it took them about three months to germinate, but here they are!

i found out that lemon trees are considered exotic here, like something that you saw one time when you were a kid on holiday in california.

indoor plants

i think i've mentioned before how i love the greening of this household of mine. actually, i'm pretty in love with my household in general. we spend a lot of time eating together, and knitting, and watching telly (or webstreamed things, cos we don't have a teev). we just started on the Xfiles from the very beginning. scary as fuck.

anyways. greening. here's the living-room window, with the shelf of plants up top, the monstera glowing green in the middle, the "mother of thousands" hanging plant, and a huge rubber tree on the left that our neighbours rescued from an alleyway:


the african violets have done that spontaneous-beautiful thing they do every summer (the closest flowers are white and purple):


i've also learnt how to make african babies. you shove a leaf in the ground, cut it down a bit, and water it for a couple of months.


my desktop now carries a jade plant, an australian mint bush, two tiny gumtrees, a big pot of basil, a tiny sprawling ivy plant and a huge seeding tray with squash and brussell sprouts in. i haven't been doing much studying.

more knitting. . . oh, and a cute baby!

see that hat? isn't the tomato hat adorable? i made it!

haha! well, i did make the hat, but our friend 'ten made the baby, and that is way more impressive. isn't she cute? with big blue eyes? and a big grin? oh, so cute!

she makes my knitting look excellent.

love to 'ten and baby and baby's daddy.