month's end

It is late Friday afternoon, the weekend nearly upon us.
It is what I call a "white sky day", rather non-descript, a light breeze, about 1 degree Centigrade with a slow melt starting.

Tracks show the activity of the cats in the snow last night

In our outing last night I came upon these awkwardly shaped blocks of French soap on sale.

500 grams and 300 grams ( approximately 1 pound and a little over 1/2 pound)

I'm so afraid I'm going to drop one on my foot in the shower and wonder if there's a way I can slice them thinner with - a hot knife??

Apart from the charming stamps, different on each side, I was particularly taken with the corvette ship (considered to be the smallest class of warship) on the one on the right.

This green one has the more dense smell of typical olive oil soaps.

Huile D'Olive is Olive Oil.

Cuit au chaudron means cooked in the cauldron

Babu has been very athletic lately. Maybe it's because spring is the air.

He sure is springing- over chairs, boxes, even Muji. He's full of beans!

Here he watches Muji entering the room; you can just imagine what is going through his little head.

I have added another fountain pen drawing to my latest little sketchbook with

Gold Sharpie paint pen for embellishments. I have been adding coloured pencil since I took this picture. I will show you my progress next time.

Goodbye March. Welcome April!

A sweet weekend to you all, dear viewers.

what's snew?

SNOW!

It was really looking like spring over this last week.

We were seeing the deer grazing quite regularly, and finally caught sight of the piebald yearling

that was just a baby last spring.

We usually see the deer at day's end when the light is low, hence the poor shots.

This past weekend we headed off to Greenwood again to my favourite health food store, Valley Natural Foods. My order of kelp was in.

The spring runoff was pooling in the low parts of the farmfields.

As always, I took particular pleasure in the line up of trees on field edges.

This fan of pines was particularly sweet.

But then, so were these lovelies.

Some of the farms we saw as we drove through the Annapolis Valley

with the North Mountain in the background

another stand of trees bordering a somewhat overgrown field

Coming into Kingston, this super stand of firs greets us

Aha! My darling little house that I show you each time we come

Well, Greenwood and the health food store have come and gone and we are driving home again

past some cultivated blueberry fields with an out-of-place subdivision bordering them.

past a little creek with a pretty stand of stunted trees or, as we would say here, "scrub"

The evening sun finally shows beneath the clouds, casting its golden light across the fields

lighting our way like a stage

I had to include this blurry shot for its drama

We got off the highway at Coldbrook looking up this commercial patch of road towards where Wally goes to work. This is sub highway #1  that traverses the Annapolis Valley called the Evangeline Trail.

We could have taken it to Greenwood, but it would have taken three times as long.

We turned left into Kentiville

Which has some pretty nice properties, this one being another favourite of ours.

I also love this Leave It To Beaver/ Father Knows Best house, a 1940's beauty.

Again, please forgive my blurry shot in the low light from a moving car.

It isn't unusual to see these giant houses on a hill

A poor shot of the Kentville "castle", the Cornwallis Inn that operated from 1930-1973 was on par with the finest hotels on the continent. It contained ninety guest rooms (including four luxury suites) and ten sample rooms for commercial travellers. The hotel had a head porter, bell boys, maitre d’hote, accounting department, chef, maid service, full kitchen and dining-room staff, clerks, stationary engineers and drivers.  English Royalty has stayed here.

Now it is rented out as apartments and offices, some of its façade compromised with commercial signage. My hope is that it is maintained well enough that someone some day will restore it to its former glory.

We decided to stretch our day and carried on past our road.

I love this old house too- so quaint.

This almost-a-castle house sat on the market for quite a while til the colour was changed from a drab all over green to this contemporary palette.

We come to the New Minas 4 corners where we proceed to do a little grocery shopping in town before going home.  The next day we debated about whether to keep our nasty old tin shed and revamp it as a greenhouse, but decided against it as I couldn't bear the idea of an eyesore makeshift structure to match our makeshift deer barrier. So the shed will go.

By day's end I saw a crocus!

Now I did tell you about snow. It has snowed in succession over the last few days,

interspersed with freezing rain.

I stepped out the front door yesterday and took this shot in our lily garden.

Such hardy little flowers

What an amazing thing Spring is

This impetus of Life

I still love the muted beauty of winter

There is an elegance to this palette that soothes me

Perhaps that's why I get a kick out of looking at my pictures from behind.

Here I am holding up that drawing I showed you in my last post to the late afternoon sunlight.

Here it is right side up, on a real gold kick, using a Sharpie paint pen.

And here is Muji carrying on the gold theme.

“Did you know that wherever you find fool's gold, real gold exists somewhere nearby? This also goes for relationships and friendships. Real gold is found in the heart. For every piece of fake gold that you discard, remember that true gold isn't too far.”   Suzy Kassem

snowy midwinter update

It's been somewhat milder over the last week, but not without another snowstorm

which meant Wally came home to do more snowblowing.

Muji kept a watchful eye. "Make sure you get that bit in the corner."

(That's our bed in the reflection of Wally's snow trajectory. I forgot to turn out the light.)

A beautiful polar drift off the roof's eave began to form

quite sculptural yet ethereal

The next day it was business as usual. The sidewalk snowblower sends a shot of snow to the side.

Wally has been building up our snowbanks so that it is hard to see out as he leaves our driveway.

By Saturday it was quite mild- well, above freezing- as we headed off to our favourite health food store in Greenwood again. I got a decent shot of this huge quintet as we set off.

Trees are the name of the game out here. We have some nice hills out here,

the ancient beginnings of the Adirondacks that are simply called "the North and South Mountains" that define the Annapolis Valley.

It was a low light day which didn't bode well for picture taking with my little camera with the slow exposures, so I waited til we got into Kingston, sister town to Greenwood

There's not much that is picturesque so I'm showing you that same house I've shown before,

a sweet rambling structure.

On the road into Greenwood we pass a tractor with his snow plough at the ready.

Wally's back at it, this time with the snow scoop. Even though we don't use this door,

getting snow away from the house will help to redirect the spring run-off away from our basement.

He's a jolly Mr. Snow Removal when the temperatures are mild like this.

This morning I missed some fantastic shots of this crow who found some bread I'm guessing.

He flew over to our cabin roof to eat it.

Once done, he braced himself

to fly away. Oh, the shot I missed as he flew right towards me!

A view late this afternoon from upstairs looking down our street.

Babu with his usual Muji hair décor

I found this old shot of him as a baby yesterday. Such a pretty boy.

Here's an update on that dye ink and watercolour painting I started last week

I've added paint pen (the white), some lavender Prismacolor pencil, and fountain pen black outline.

I hope you've been well and finding peace in the small joys of life. Winter can take its toll.

I hear it is already Spring in England and of course Summer is continuing in the southern hemisphere.

I learned a small something this week that I thought I would share with you.

It seems we have only a certain amount of psychological energy in a day which explains why one can feel tired from emotions or too many distractions or being "detailed to death".  Making ourselves aware of these frustrating expenditures and narrowing in on what we'd prefer to be spending their time on can help us to circumvent the myriad of mundane activities that make up so much of our day, but  if you can't circumvent, the real trick is to automate the necessary little details. Even the time it takes to think about things like what to wear, cleaning routines, tidying habits, or for me, the amount of supplements we 4 of us take here (Wally, me and the 2 cats) can take away from the allotted energy we want for more important things. It reminds me of how efficiently a well thought out business runs. It needn't be so structured that you lose spontaneity, but if one equates freedom with time, it is worth it to free up our minds for the things that really matter.