Boys' fort

My oldest two are overjoyed to have their own fort, at long last!
They planned and toiled and sawed and hammered.... my favorite part of the process (from a spectator's point of view) was the part I took middle boy to UFA to get hardware. They needed some hinges and handles to take the project to the next level. We enter store and are overwhelmed, as always, with the sheer magnitude of inventory this place has. So we wander until a UFA employee spots us and helps. This man is a gem. He talks directly to my son, as though this is an important purchase to be considered carefully. I suppose to my 10 year old, it is. The man asks him how many doors the 'fort' will have. With furrowed brow, counting on his fingers, my kid resembles a Norman Rockwell painting depicting youthful gravity of situations such as this. "One door in the front, a flapping window, and the escape hatch." The man nods, and together they determine the hardware that would best suit the requirements of the fort. Not once did the UFA guy defer to me (except when it came time to pay, naturally) or act in any way but in a serious manner. Several minutes later, we leave the store with a bag of hardware and a kid one step closer to the ultimate fort.

The burned spoon... and the balls of.... cotton.

The eldest boy, my child of few afflictions, woke me up late one night. His ear hurt, he said. And knowing him, it must have been 10/10 pain scale to:
a) wake him up
b) motivate him to bother anyone about it

Sensing the urgency of the situation, I defaulted to my mother's home remedy for ear-ache: a few drops of warm oil in ear, stopped up with cotton ball.
I first located the oil... I chose olive, that seemed the most natural somehow. And healthier too. Extra virgin. High in omega, mono-saturated goodness. Nothin' but the best for my kid's ear. I poured a little into a container and microwaved it. Olive oil came out a hot, spattering grease-bomb that clearly was not going to do the trick. I tried adding some more from the bottle to cool it, and it became disappointingly cold again. Time was of the essence, no more mucking around. This is when the idea came to me... why not the tried-and-true (payoff, finally, for all those hours of watching Intervention! hah!) of the lighter-under-spoon trick. Soon, Kid was laying on his side, nicely warmed oil in ear. This is when I realized I had no cotton balls. Q-tips* however, I did have. Commence q-tip harvest. Had I been more cognisant, I would have hummed (random fact confirming my childhood was somewhat quirky) one of the cotton picker folk songs my mother taught sis and I one summer. Alas, my focus was on the timeliness of the matter and soon I had enough that I formed into a lumpy-looking ball of cotton that went into eldest boy's ear. I got him settled, and fell back into my own bed. Mission complete.

Now imagine the following morning the sight my husband was graced with.... The bathroom now contains the following items spread over the counter that were clearly not there the night before:
a spoon (with soot on bottom)
a lighter
a bottle of specialty olive oil
several white sticks with tiny wisps of fluff clinging to the ends


**unrelated story, but worthy of mentioning (I rationalize to self at 1:04am when I should be sleeping, like every other 30+ responsible parent... we need to bank our sleep for nights when our beloved children wake us) is the story of the National Gallery of Canada where my parents brought my sister and I when we were 15 and 16, respectively, on our drive across Canada (I feel the urge to capitalize and italicize, but am resisting, to make up for over-use of commas--- yes, I am aware, but cannot stop,,,) one of the first parts of the gallery we were privy to was a display of very large sculptures. Of the WTF abstract kind. Recognising something at last, I said to my sister (a little too loudly in retrospect): 'AHA... giant Q-tips!!'. I've scoured and scoured (this is code for 'rearrange wording on google') to find a photo of this exhibit, but alas, for naught. It did, I will swear upon any religious text of your choosing, greatly resemble three very large Q-tips... kind of poking out of the floor. Now I could go into the 'what is art' ramble, but I instead recommend a really interesting documentary: My Kid Could Paint That. Come to think of it, I watched that on another night when I was up too late when I should have been banking sleep.... okay, wow, super diffuse blog entry.

Portrait for production of Harvey

Homemade kitchen cabinets

At first, I was ashamed of the fact we'd decided to build our own cabinets.
Simple math, however, cured me of this emotion. It soon became clear that we paid less than $500 dollars for cabinets that one builder had quoted us $30,000.00, I am now officially proud of our home-jobber cabinets. We are not carpenters nor designers so stifle the sniggers, y'all.
I had become enamoured with this look in Eaglesham, when checking out old abandoned farmhouses and saw inside some houses right in Eaglesham and they mostly had home-jobbers painted in authentic country 50s period colours. Love it! This was exactly the look I wanted. And I also like having solid wood (impossible to get nowadays: even the high-end cabinets are pressed board- with exception of the doors). 
Plywood and paint and planning (and of course time) was really all it took. Our doors are in the basement ready to install, but between the curtains for the bottom cabinets I sewed (need to add seamstress to things I am not expert at) and painted inners of the upper cabinets, I'm in no hurry.


painted layer of black over a layer of brown...
under a few coats of white, then I sanded edges and corners
to give a rustic/aged look 



to left of window: roosters from my grandma
to the right of the window: vases from my mother in law in Holland

I fell in deep like with this toe-kick look and Eric obliged
*sigh* could stare at it all day... that and the chandelier over the landing on our stairs.

Encaustic Painting Workshop

Saturday I was lucky. Somehow all of my arty planets aligned and I was able to attend an encaustic workshop at the Creative arts center with local famous artist Carrie Klukas. From ten till three we painted with coloured wax. It was awesome. I made odd looking paintings but it was the creative process that really made it a great day (plus the smell of beeswax...mmmm).


CK herself





The colours we were working with that day





 A sampling of the weird and wonderful things I created that day:

 





















Smarty Pant(less) or The Empress is Not Wearing Any Pants

Last 'floor-sanding' related story.
Promise.


Late night at new house sanding floors.
Again.
I finished up just past midnight and covered in dust, stood outside my car. I then began to contemplate the mess my dusty self was about to leave on my black seats.
Standing there, a most genius epiphany comes to me: why not just remove my dusty pants and sweater, thus sparing myself cleaning yet another thing? Eureka!
As we are situated far enough from any road to worry about compromised privacy, I remove my pants and sweater (quickly, as its minus ten, brrrr) and roll them in a neat ball, stowing said ball on floor of car. Quite pleased with my incredible cleverness, I hop into the car.
The car that had not been started yet. The car with leather, minus ten degree seats. Yowzahhh!! Really cold seats on nearly bare skin is a shock... although admittedly I can appreciate that had I been born the other gender, things potentially would have been much worse.
After regaining my breath, I embark on my journey home.
I had mapped out a route in my mind that would almost completely bypass town.
And besides, it was well past midnight on a Sunday.
Who'd be out then?
Who indeed would be out then, you ask.
Now its funny you asked that question because I have an answer for that.
I had pulled up to the only set of lights on my oh-so-clever route, smug in the knowledge I was almost there and had not encountered any other vehicles up until this point. Said light had only just turned red, so I waited, heck... I was practically home already. Self, you are a veritable genius.
That is when they pulled up.
A full pick-up load of teenage boys.
As vantage points go, the view from that pick-up looked down onto my pasty, bare legs and the rest of my dusty self. My undies *would* have passed for shorts. That is, had they; A) been a colour other than classic granny panty white B) been worn in mid-Summer rather than mid-Autumn. I willed myself to become invisible. Mantra playing repeatedly in my mind: 'don't look this way don't look this way please do not look this way'. My palms began to sweat along with, ironically enough, the backs of my thighs where I had earlier gotten the cold shock from the leather seat. I recklessly considered blasting through the intersection just to get away as the panic rose. Running a red light its just plain stupid, no matter what time of day it is. In addition to that, this particular intersection has red light cameras set up. Set up at an even more compromising angle than truck idling beside me and seeing as registration of my car is in my husband's name, he would have received a 300 dollar unflattering photograph of his wife covered in dust dressed in a stretched out work t-shirt and granny panties. Not happening. I took all of these factors into consideration and decided to go with potential humiliation as opposed to unflattering expensive photos and possible death.
I held my breath. I could probably roll forward, just a little out of their field of vision, but movement would potentially attract attention.

And that would not be good.

I have never sat at a red light for such a long time. Seconds felt like minutes, and a minute is a long time to stress over impeding discovery and heckling by a gang of teenagers. I willed the light to turn green, I willed myself to transparency, I willed a small explosion to occur across the street. Anything to divert attention away from my direction.

Perhaps, after all, it was my lucky night.
Perhaps it wasn't my time for public humiliation, but by some miracle of the heavens the light eventually turned green... and those teenagers gunned ahead of me through that intersection, leaving me behind.
My granny panty clad behind behind, that is.

this is not me (FYI)

Sweet cookie jar

Love my new cookie jar.
Got it in Edmonton last weekend and have been
baking cookies non-stop to keep it full!