Is There Anybody Out There?

Those who grew up with certain music might now be hearing that in the tune of the song by Pink Floyd with that name.

In the description of that song (here, on Wikipedia), it refers to it as a distress call.

And that is kind of how I am saying it, too. I am feeling a human need to reach out and connect with others.

It has been many moons since I wrote in this blog. Like anyone else, I have been occupied. I have so much I wish I could write, even just to get it out of my head. I do miss it — doing the writing AND connecting with the small community of fellow WordPress bloggers I have gotten to know from a distance.

“From a distance.” How far away from each other are we, really? Are we in some ways closer with our “pen-pal” friends on the internet than we are with our face-to-face connections? And then I think about how it will be in heaven, with no more barriers hindering perfect fellowship because sin and its effects will be eradicated.

Anyway, that’s my mini-ramble. Next, I am going to see what my 17-month-old granddaughter is trying to say from her playpen behind me. Maybe she would like to move to her high chair and eat something.

Are you reading this? If so, please let me know in a comment, and if you feel like telling me a bit about what’s happening in your life today, I am all the proverbial ears.

PS: Is there still a way to revert to the old style of WordPress? I hate these “blocks” and the rest of it, and every time I did come back in here to write since they changed it, I was able to find the option to revert, by poking around. I’m not finding it today.

A Synchronous Moment

So many synchronous events have been happening for me lately. Here’s one from today:

My 11-year-old youngest child and I were working on a double puzzle (two different puzzles in one box). Nothing too crazy, just 240 pieces each.

There was one piece we lacked to complete the right side edge. It looked like we weren’t going to be able to find it in the remaining pile we’d sorted, so I said, “I’m going to have to dig through the pieces we put in the bag for the other puzzle and see if I can find it.”

But then I saw this one piece on the table that looked like it might work. I pointed at it and said, “Unless…”

And my daughter, with more excitement, said, “Unless!”

Then we said it together, loudly, “UNLESS!”

And at that exact moment, the TV beside us, on which we had the movie “The Lorax” playing, got to the famous part that says “UNLESS…”

Then we both did a big “Oh, wow, was that ever cool!’ type thing.

I said, “I feel like I should write this out.”

And so I ran to my computer and wrote this. I read it aloud to my daughter for her approval.

Oh, and to give you closure, yes, it was the right piece.

And for more closure, here’s the famous Dr. Seuss quote I mean:

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

It’s a small synchronous event, but, like the puzzle piece (though I could be wrong and maybe it’s just something cool to observe and enjoy) it just might fit into a bigger picture.

(PS: I was just about to publish this when my daughter said, “I got another piece!” She then echoed with “Piece!” To which I responded with “Peace, mon!” And she said, “I was JUST about to say that!” OK, I better get back to the puzzle.)

A similar blog entry: When Similar Stuff Happens

Writing Teachers

I don’t fancy myself the greatest writer in the world. I feel like I am always learning in the craft.

Not all of my teachers have been the kind with university degrees, but one was.

Mr. Norcott is the face that stands out in the cloud of influences who shaped my writing foundation. He was a Viking in 1980s garb, but a kindly one, more like Lyle of Veggie Tales fame. He had a round face framed by bright blonde hair, with a matching golden beard, and eyes waiting to laugh at the slightest provocation. Most often he was smiling.

Kindness, respect, and the sharing of one’s stories have a way of impacting a student much more impressively than does a dry textbook.

Mr. Norcott presented the basics of good writing, as is common for a school teacher to offer people aged 13 to 14 in my country, outlined by his university instruction and the rules of the school board, but he painted with his own unique brush.

Rare do I think of the word “personification” without Mr. Norcott coming to mind. Same with “onomatopoeia”, “hyperbole”, and “metaphor”. These were not just words for me, but they were art being born and raised.

I never set about to become a writer. When asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, I never said “A writer”. I had other ideas, such as becoming a meteorologist or a librarian, but being a writer was what I already was, because I wrote and I still do.

If you are a person who writes books, a blog, or even to a friend, putting your words out there so they are no longer trapped within, whether they be polished or raw, you, too, are a writer. Own that title and enjoy it.

And by virtue of you sharing yourself, you might also unknowingly be a teacher.

 

My Writing Shed

In the spring of 2015, the idea came to me that I should build a shed in which I could somewhat hide away, close enough to my house that my kids could find me if needed, yet far enough away that I wouldn’t have to hear them bickering.

For a few months, I observed my acre of land, watching where the sun and shadows landed, imagining what view I would have through windows.

I measured out some potential sites with rope, and asked the opinion of my husband and some of my kids. The feelings were not unanimous so I kept searching.

Finally, I decided upon a spot.

Me enjoying morning coffee on the site where my shed would be built

Here I sat at my chosen building site amidst cement pier blocks from the local building supplies store and the 3×7 timbers we purchased from a friend who milled them himself. We live in an area where forestry is what fuels the economy. Trees are life and there is no shortage of them.

I had it in my mind that we could build this shed over the course of a weekend. Haha! How naive I was. Maybe my carpenter dad and an assistant could perform such a miracle, but this was my first building project.

I grew up with carpenter’s tools all around, and used them in varying capacities, but at the age of 48, I bought my first very own tool: a square.I wrote my initials on it in Sharpie.

A cool thing about this building project was that it was funded by the money my dad left me. It wasn’t a fortune, but it covered the costs. I kept every receipt, intending to add them up someday, but as of the time of this writing, I still haven’t done so. I am not sure I want to. My guess is that it totals around $10,000. I could be way off.

Family and friends helped us get that first wall up.

It would take a lot of words to tell the story on constructing my shed, and someday I might write those details, but for the sake of brevity, I will show you some photos of how it looks.

This was before the bed and curtains went in, and there was different furnishing.

In keeping with the fine tradition of my carpenter father, the details remain unfinished. We still need to do the trim around the windows and where the floor meets the wall. The writing desk is very old. The chair, too. A local craftsman built the bookshelf.

The shed in a winter sunrise

The bed, not shown, is below this window. When one lies on it, they look out the French doors at the natural beauty of the yard and nature beyond.

There is a single bed we bought from a friend in the neighbourhood for $20. The walls are tongue and groove knotty pine. The floor is laminate.

The pictures on the wall my parents bought when I was a child. They bring me back to those years, right on down to that day in the early 1970s when we picked them up from a store on Commercial Drive in East Vancouver, around the corner from our home. My sister and I split them up when our dad died.

The windows were chosen from the “boneyard” at the local building supply shop. Those are windows customers ordered but decided not to buy, so we got them at a discounted price.

There is electricity, with a cable buried between the shed and our main house. We hired a guy my husband knows who is an electrician to do that part. We dug the trench by hand using pickaxes and shovels in our rocky ground.

The trench for electrical cable

A view in summer

A view in winter

The shed is 8’x12′. The lowest wall is 8′ high, and it slopes up to 12′. We hope to someday put a bunk in the high end, with a little hexagonal window, but for now it is sufficient for a peaceful hideaway. Everyone who has slept there raves about the peacefulness and beauty.

There is very little dust or dirt in this shed. I keep it that way and it is not difficult, due to the low traffic and absence of mess-making activities or substances. It is heated in winter by an electric free-standing oil-filled heater. The walls and floors have the highest R-value of Roxul insulation we could get locally.

I had never heard there was such a thing as a “tiny house” until after we built this shed. Now I know of that phenomenon and wonder if we might someday add on a little bathroom and plumbing. But as it stands, I am content with it, and I am grateful.

Fighting The Doldrums Of Winter

One of my daughters in -43° Celsius. Her hair is very long dark brown, but all you can see of it is frozen white sprizzles poking out the sides to match the frost on her eyelashes.

(Reposted, as yesterday’s version somehow had the commenting section disabled.)

A blogging brother in Christ asked this question in a recent post (here): “How do you fight the doldrums of winter?”

He wrote of some action steps he takes to keep moving forward, albeit in a slower than ideal manner when winter’s cold affects even the spirit.

I shared an action step of my own, which was as follows:

Sometimes, no matter what I do, I still feel them.

But, in general, a positive difference began about ten years ago when one of my daughters and I were discussing how annoyed we were at ourselves for all the whining we did concerning winter, and how it didn’t help.

She and I decided not to complain about winter anymore.

At first, it was silly. With forced cheerfulness we said things like, “Wow, I love it when it gets down to minus thirty!” And “Snow up to my knees is awesome!” Or “Isn’t it neat when the snow plow doesn’t come down our road till we’re stuck for a week?”

We made each other laugh with our silly remarks, and we’d correct ourselves and each other when we slipped up and griped.

But over the years, the attitude increasingly became real.

Last week, that daughter sent me a photo of herself standing at a bus stop in northern BC, a few hours north of me, waiting to catch a ride to university. It was -43 Celsius and she was smiling with white frost on her eyelashes. She looked like a proverbial ice princess.

We talked later, with laughter, about how it’s become almost a competition among us northern folk to say what coldness we’ve endured. We might not outright prefer it over a nice warm day, but there’s a hint of bragging when we can say we lived through something not normally considered pleasant.

Plus the cold makes for some good storytelling later around a fire.

Then there was the situation at my place last week. In the high minus thirties Celsius, I was burning more wood than usual, trying to keep the house warm inside. Our chimney pipe from the middle floor and up through the steep roof over the third floor is really long, our wood is a bit wet (all the wood we got last rainy spring, summer, and fall was wet, and we haven’t yet cut enough to let it season a full year before needing to use it), and there must have been a blockage of creosote. Well, maybe that should be another blog entry, as this has already gotten long. You can read it here:“Fire And Water Emergencies”.

Open Pages

Oh, the array of documents that sit with open doors across the top of my laptop screen! It’s like a messy kitchen waiting to be organized so the main meal’s cooking can take place.

These tabs have piled up over the past few weeks, and I long to address them all to the point that I can willingly close a bunch of them.

Here are the members of the queue before me:

1. The Wix home page of a friend’s website for his editing business.

2. My own Wix attempt in draft mode, inspired by my friend’s site.

3. An article on how to name one’s editing and proofreading business.

4. An article on how to start an editing and proofreading business.

5. A video on how to do alternating cast-on for double rib (knitting). Because I have a knitting pattern for making a winter headband, but I’m daunted by a cast-on process I’ve never tried.

6. An article on how to write a great memoir. Its first point is on how to write a premise in one sentence.

7. An article on how to structure a premise for stronger stories.

8. An article on how to build a compelling narrative arc for your memoir.

9. An article on vignettes, scenes, and dialogues.

10. An article on what everyone ought to do to create vivid characters.

11. “Alaska Book”. This is one of dozens of Google Docs I have that are part of the memoir on which I am working. I hope Google Docs never crashes.

12. “Excavator in the Pond”, a Google Doc. This is one of the stories in my memoir.

13. “Boots in the Mudroom”, another Google Doc, and another story in the memoir.

14. “Milk in the Snow”, still another Google Doc for the memoir. I name them simply. This is for my own quick reference. They might end up with new titles, they might be amalgamated into other chapters, and they might even be axed in the end.

There. That helped me purge a bit from my mind, just seeing it all written out.

I’d like to read all the articles and close their windows so I can feel like the groceries and the dishes are put away and I can start cooking up a new mess in my actual writing.

Can anyone relate to having multiple documents open on their computer, and the relief that comes from closing several of them?

Reading and Writing

A “Taste of Home”. The man in the mural is Danny Lytton. He once came to my old farm to help round up a couple Belgian horses I was boarding for horse loggers. The Belgians didn’t want to leave. Danny was so good with horses, he managed to coax them to the trailer.

I’m sitting in my fave little local cafe (there are only two – one we call “The Dry Place” because the food is too dry for our liking and the coffee always tastes burnt, and this one my family and I call “Taste”, short for “Taste Of Home”, because we kept forgetting its real name years ago, which first was “One Another, A Coffee House”; then it was “Bicycle Tree”; and now it’s “Rise & Grind Coffee Shop”, but one of my sons calls it “the kaif”, phonetically pronouncing cafe that way because he plays with words like his mom does).

Ah, it sounds like Jim Croce (whom my son might call Jim Croas phonetically) singing over the speakers right now, something about a Georgia girl he hopes will take him back. Now Gordon Lightfoot is singing about how it would be if his love could read his mind.

While I sip a soy cafe au lait, I have been reading a book, the latest one I’ve bought. It’s a slow process because so many things I read in it remind me of points from my own Alaskan past, so I go make notes in my manuscript documents. That, and I make penciled notes in the book itself.

Here is a page from the abovementioned book, which is called “Alaska in the Wake of the North Star”. Having looked at the publisher’s website (Hancock House), I feel I should contact them about my book, as it seems to fit with a lot of what they have published.

I would love to know if anyone reading this also makes notes in the books they read. 🙂

All These Kids

One of few photos I have of my old house in Alaska

I never used to like kids. They annoyed me. For several months when I was 14 to 15 and super-selfish, my parents took care of a baby for a friend of theirs who had to be away in a hospital for cancer treatment. I mostly hid in my room with music cranked on the stereo I’d bought with my own earnings, to get away from the noise.

When any kids less than a few years younger than me tried to talk to me, I’d ignore them and walk quickly away. I know, how rude, eh?

Then, when I was 23, I met some amazing children who changed my outlook. They were so down-to-earth and enjoyable. One of them, a boy who was seven, always asked me to take him for rides on a Honda 4-wheeler, on the southeast Alaskan homestead of the folks on whose land we were living. We’d ride along in silence, find a beautiful spot to park, and wander around and talk and laugh. Sometimes we’d fish for spawned-out pink salmon off the edge of a wooden bridge over a creek.

My little friend and his older brother adored their baby sister. Their mother, an OB-GYN nurse with chestnut hair that reached past her waist, with whom I loved sitting and talking while gathering information for my own eventual motherhood, was soon to have another baby sister for them.

Within the year, I got married (albeit to a man who wasn’t lifetime material — see the long story here) and had my first child. We had moved into our own place, in a little house (24′ x 32′) we built for ourselves at the back of a gravel pit. We didn’t own the government land on which the house was situated, but we were there via a permit to be the caretakers of the business. As part of the permission, the house had to be moveable, and so it was built on skids (big logs laid on the ground) to later tow away.

Our nearest neighbours were 3.5 miles down old logging roads with nothing but forest between us. The other neighbours, on whose land we had been living prior to this, were 5 miles away and across a river that had no bridge. We had no phone but a VHF marine radio, we heated the house with wood, we pumped water uphill from a well with a Honda pump, and our electricity was from a 7-kilowatt Lister diesel generator we’d run for about six hours a day – just long enough to keep the fridge items cold and the freezer items frozen.

It was lonely out there, especially when the man of the house had gone out on the tugboat to deliver gravel or to do commercial fishing for the same boss. My motto soon became, “I have no friends, and so I will just have to make my own.”

My second baby was born within 17 months of my first. Then a couple years later my third was born. These children were a lot of work, yes, but they were and continue to be my dearest friends. Four more children later, and I’m a mother of seven now.

Not only are there my own children, though, but some of their friends have also become my friends. Some refer to me as “Mom 2”. I am honoured.

Here we are in December. Holiday time allows for more of my kids to be home. The oldest four are out working in other areas, but they come home when they get extra days off, sometimes with their respective partners whom I also love. With more people in the house, it is warm and pleasant, but oh so busy! The younger kids stop their usual activities when their beloved older siblings come home, so excited are they.

There is less time for blogging with all the family around, but I am going to keep trying to squeeze in a word or two or seven hundred when able. Like right now (word count: 695!), when most are sleeping-in on a Saturday morning and one has gone across the road to play with a friend.

Maranatha!

Hippie Coffee

Look at that golden froth atop the coffee. That’s what happens when you blend hot soy milk, turmeric, and a few other goodies into your brew.

Specifically, here’s how I do them: Half a mug of Ginger Fire Chai, half a mug of Aeropress’d espresso roast coffee (freshly ground in a burr grinder with a few shakes of hot red pepper flakes), an ounce of heated soy milk, Himalayan pink salt, stevia leaf powder, black pepper, coconut oil, nutmeg, cinnamon, and turmeric. Froth it up in the blender.

I prefer this over everything I’ve ever had in any coffee shop. Way cheaper, too.

I’ve heard that coffee and tea mixed together is called a “dirty chai”, and when you add soy milk it’s a “dirty hippie”. But this stuff is more like a “crazy health-freak hippie”.

Yeah, man. I can dig it. Call it what you like, but give it a try. You might like it as much as I do.

Watching Paint Dry

Here I sit in my basement — dressed in black ski pants, a camouflage wool jacket, burgundy Baffin snow boots, and with a red and black neck tube wrapped around my head, hair pinned up with a wooden hair fork — watching the shine on a pine door, waiting for it to go dull so I can move it off the sawhorses and put the other slab down for coating.

You may have heard of things that are as exciting as watching paint dry. Well, I can tell you that watching clear-coat satin acrylic polyurethane wood finish in the drying process is almost as exciting as that.

(If you read my blog post from yesterday, you will know it was my goal to do this yesterday. However, that didn’t go as planned, but today it’s done, and nobody got injured or died as a result of the delay.)

To be fair, I did have a delightful mug of turmeric coffee to bring a pop of liveliness to the event. And the smell of milled pine mixed with low-odour polyurethane isn’t bad. Combine it all with good music from my phone and I’ve got a nice little Saturday afternoon party-for-one happening.

Oh, make that party for two! No, three… four… five! In walked my Pom-Chi dog, then my youngest child, and now two cats.

And now that door is ready to be moved.

If you’ve read this, I thank you for making me not completely be talking to myself.

There we have consecutive day 7 of my Just Write challenge on WordPress. Yahoo, celebrate! I bet you’re as entertained as you’d be by watching paint dry, eh?

PS: Did you ever notice that the word “pine” is right there inside of “happiness”?