2. lay-over...Calgary

The next day, Saturday, was the first of our two lay-over days.

Denise is an amazing person who has lived in Guatemala, been a teacher, paints, does collage, photography, was props (most of which she made herself) and stage manager for several theatrical groups (her basement is filled with shelf after shelf of materials and tools), does fusing and lampwork among her many talents and she talks about it all so nonchalantly...well, you know) and I can't even imagine the things she has done that I don't know about yet and lives in a wonderful old house 

that she had remodeled and added onto and did much of the work herself including making the decorative tiles in the kitchen and she gardens with a sweet garden in the back. And she cooks. And she has amazing friends. I am seriously in awe of this woman.

So.

We lounged around in the morning with coffee and crowned Catharine with sticky weed  

Denise, Catharine, and Duffy

while we watched the sparrows, who were totally unconcerned with us, flit about and dine on the nanking cherries which were so profuse they weighed the branches down.

Then it was off for Duffy's walk through the neighborhood (I'm always surprised when I go up north during the summer to see so many things blooming since by mid-summer here, that's all done with) and to the park that overlooks the river and flood plain and an incredible view of the Calgary skyline.

that's ACAD behind the silver parking garage that is reflecting the clouds behind me

Natali, who lives nearby, arrived for our breakfast of waffles and a champagne toast

Cheryl (friend of Denise who slept over and who writes and performs jazz), Catharine, Natali

and then we four took off for a driving tour of NW Calgary which has a huge hill (whose name escapes me) in the middle of this clean and pretty city. 

A stop at Peter's Drive In for milkshakes was also on the agenda.

On our way back to the house we stopped by the house of Natali's friend Jill who was in the middle of putting up 40 pounds of peaches in various ways and she sent us off with a bag of our own.

Then back to Denise's for an evening of martinis, dinner, and companionship.

an arty glassy week/end

I'm tired and I don't want to go back into the city today. We just got home last night about 9:30. Now we are supposed to go back this afternoon for our work week on the mountain wall. This going into the city every week for the last 3 ½ months is beginning to tell on me. But we are so close to being finished. Two more weeks we think. We hope. The carving is done on panel 3 so we just have the shading to do and then the last panel.

We worked our week last week, came home Thursday evening and then turned around and went back on Friday for the open house at our friends' glass blowing studio. It was fun to see the regular participants, our friend Gene who does fused and stained glass, our friend Jennifer who flame works beads and makes some awesome earrings, and of course Dick and Kathy who host the open house in their studio and blow glass.

It was a different crowd this year seemed like. Some regulars showed up but many seemed to be missing. We did all right though. Sold a vase and a small bowl and one of the little pieces I made just for the show. Might have sold more but I just wasn't up for explaining over and over about why these small castings cost so much. Since we have so much commission work these days I wasn't motivated as much as I have been at past shows. For me, it was all about the socializing this year.

Saturday night after we closed down Marc and I headed over to our local gallery for their very last opening. Oliver and Nancy are retiring at the end of the year, closing the gallery. We'll have to find a new local gallery but it's going to be hard I think, finding the right one. Goldesberry Gallery was very unique, the only fine craft gallery in the city and they did very well for us over the years. We're going to miss them.

And Sunday after closing we all went to Star Pizza for dinner and relaxing and laughing with our friends which is why we didn't get home til 9:30 last night.

Now, today, I am ready for a day in which nothing is required of me.

this old house, part 2

This is the second part of one long post. If you haven't read the first part, you can see it here. Go on, as Pearl would say, we'll wait.

Back now?

the house about 10 years into our ownership, you can see the 'skirt' around the bottom of the house

Some of my long time readers might remember my lament (it's worth the read if you have the time I think) about abandoning my 125 +/- year old, very cool house in the city. It needed more care than we could afford and once we moved permanently to the country house, with little reason, aka work, to come in, it really started to deteriorate rapidly.

the house about 5 years before we moved, the skirt had been removed to level the house and never replaced

Houses do that, fall apart much quicker when there is no life in them.

Anyway, it had gotten to the point that I didn't want prospective clients to come to the shop, and not just because the outside looked like an abandoned house, which it was heavily resembling, but the yard also. I preferred to meet them at their homes or offices which entailed lugging several very heavy bags of samples, portfolios, and design books along.

I kept telling The Boy and LL what bad shape the house was in but I think they were a little surprised when faced with the reality. Because we got a little busy the week or two before their arrival, we did not get everything done we thought we would do. Because our little studio apartment was in the same terrible shape, that's where our efforts went. They didn't have a toilet because we moved it to our bathroom. Their kitchen sink was still stopped up because we were fixing the leaking sink in our kitchenette.

So they rolled up their sleeves and went to work.

The house looks happier. It still has all the same major problems...termites, ancient plumbing, ancient wiring...but they are fixing up the inside and outside. They are repairing the damage caused by having the house leveled 10 years ago, taking care of all the little things we ignored over the years. There was a time when we engaged in minor repairs but somewhere along the way we quit doing it.

the house and yard now

They installed a toilet and unstopped the sink (no mean feat). They have filled in the cracks in the sheetrock, scraped the peeling paint, repaired the screen doors, replaced rotten boards, given the wood floors a good cleaning (well, given the whole house a good cleaning). They've started giving it a new coat of paint which is making a huge difference and they're working on replacing the skirt on the exterior with something more within their budget.

And the yard is being maintained although they did get rid of my ground cover and planted grass, returned the old turtle enclosure to yard. But they keep the sidewalk and driveway swept, something I rarely did and stuff is getting watered when needed now and they're keeping the ditch out front clear. They are slowly getting to the things that have grown unrestrained for three or four years.

The place is looking tended.

And that makes me happy.

ps. and yes, they are very appreciative of our letting them live in the house as we are appreciative of their taking the responsibility for it off our shoulders.

this old house, part 1

You might remember that last spring I got a call from The Boy and LL (our daughter-in-law) in Portland. They were ready to move back to Texas and could they stay in the house temporarily while they decided on their next course of action. They arrived at the end of April and have settled in, temporary being only temporary for now.

Since we still used it on occasion (and hopefully more than occasionally in the future) we decided to carve ourselves out a little apartment in the back corner. We took the two smallest rooms, what had been the laundry room when we lived there and the small office adjacent to it and one of the two bathrooms and this is where we stay when we are in the city.

The old laundry room and the kitchen both opened into the back hall which, when I bought the house, was the back porch so the house had two back doors. I had the back porch enclosed so that I didn't have to walk through the entire house to go from the kitchen to the laundry room.

To separate the two living abodes, the kids installed a door from the kitchen to the back hall which gives us a private entrance to our little apartment through the back door. They can still use the back door but mostly refrain when we are 'in residence'. The other doors into our part have been closed and blocked by furniture.

The old laundry room became our kitchenette with our single burner, coffee maker, and mini fridge. We have a small table and two chairs in there too so I finally have the 'eat in kitchen' I have always wanted but somehow this isn't exactly how I envisioned it.

This (along with the little bathroom) is the oldest room in the house. By that I mean it hasn't been updated since ever. It still has the big porcelain covered cast iron sink with two separate faucets, one for cold, one for hot. The drainboard which you can't really see is exactly that, a board which slants slightly into the sink and has a groove running around the perimeter for water to drain into the sink.

What had been the office (originally it was the nursery and then the play room when the kids shared a room and then our son's room) became our bedroom/living room combo. You can just see the end of the bed which takes up the other half of this room. The last time we painted this room, we intended to strip all the woodwork. This bank of windows and one door frame was as far as we got and we never did go back and repaint the rest of the woodwork.

The little bathroom opens off that. The door into the bathroom is adjacent to the doorway into the kitchenette.

After the kids moved out and the antique toilet broke, we turned the second, ancient, bathroom into a storage room for all our canoeing gear so it took some doing to get it back in working order. We installed a toilet and had to repair leaking plumbing under the house from the tub. You can see it still has the old, two faucet sink and claw foot tub. Also the hole we had to cut in the sheetrock many years ago to repair leaking plumbing in the wall (we left the hole accessible in case we ever had to get in there again, at least that was the rationale, more likely we were just too lazy to fix it right).

I've stayed in hotel rooms bigger than this. In fact every hotel room I ever stayed in was bigger than this but it serves it's purpose, giving us a small place while we are in town to work.

boredom, Big Mama, and other misc. stuff

You may have noticed or not that I haven't been around blogland much the last several weeks and my own posting is down. Some of that was recuperating from the snake bite, some of it is boredom. Not you all who continue to write interesting posts but me. I guess I've ODed on all the political hating and attacks on the rights of women and the extreme right wearing their christianity on their sleeves all the while they are trampling on the lives of everyone who isn't lucky enough to be rich and certainly NOT acting the way their god wants them to act...well, I could go on, right? But I'm trying to rid myself of the anger along with the venom.

Big Mama started circling the edge of her pond several days ago looking for a way out so I put together a make-shift bridge and ramp to the yard yesterday. It didn't take her long to find her way into the yard, though I didn't actually see her get out until a little while ago. I happened to look up just in time to see her take a nose dive off the edge of the pond, the edge of her shell hit the edge of the bricks surrounding the pond and flipped her on her back. So apparently, she's not using the ramp at all. Going to have to re-think this. She had her head pulled in and the impact didn't seem to phase her at all but it sure freaked me out, running out there to make sure she was OK.

This fenced yard is easily 20 times bigger than the yard she had in the city to roam around in but she is still focused on the fence and the gate, probing to find a way out. She'll continue in this activity until she finally lays eggs. Once she does that, she'll be content to stay in her pond and I'll remove the bridge.

The pond itself is pretty icky and needs to be emptied out and scrubbed. The algae has exploded with the sun and the warm weather and I know eventually the filter will get it cleaned out but it will take some time. Right now it's very green and murky.

Well, what else? Our son and DIL arrived Saturday night and they have been cleaning the house and unloading all their stuff from the big truck. They're glad to be back. I had been trying to prepare them for the condition of the house but they were still a little surprised at how bad it actually is. Marc spent last Friday and Saturday there getting the rotten pipe under the house from the bathtub drain fixed, emptying the kitchen cabinets, and then moving the bit of furniture that we have there to our two small rooms and moving as much of the other crap out and into the shop as possible. There's a lot to be hauled to the dump or set out for heavy trash day when it comes around.

The other thing that's been capturing some of my attention is I'm working on models again, more of the small botanica erotica pieces, one finished and another getting there. I've wasted a lot of time since we got all the previous waxes cast but now I think I'm over that barrier, at least for now. If we get these two big walls, and I'm pretty certain at this point that we will, I doubt I will have much time to work on waxes. Day after tomorrow is the big meeting.

I guess the last thing is that today it is two weeks since the snake bite. I'm walking pretty well now, almost normally but my foot is still swollen. Especially right now since I've been on it most of the day, even taking a test drive to the grocery store and back. Now I'm ready to head to the library since I'm out of reading material having finished The Hunger Games trilogy last night.

attempting resuscitation

Did I mention that my son and DIL are moving back to Texas? They decided that Portland was not the place for them. Their plan is to move back to Houston for several months while they reconnoiter Austin with the intent of settling there. Instead of moving cold like they did to Portland, they want to line things up beforehand so they asked if they could stay in the Houston house for a while.

Which is fine. No problem but you know, right, that we still use the city house when we have work, not that we've had that much work in the last two years but we are hoping that will change and soon. So we will still need to stay there when we have work.

The old house in the city sits vacant now that we don't live there and I don't call our days in when we have work, living there. We don't do housework, cleaning, or cook. And we don't do maintenance. A house as old as ours, and I would put it at between 110 and 115 years old but could be a little older, needs constant care and when no one is doing that, it tends to fall apart at a faster pace.

It's first and main problem is termites but short of tenting they can't really be dealt with and tenting for termites for a house we don't live in is way down on the priority list. The second big problem is the plumbing which was probably last tended to in a significant way back in the 50s and some of it could possibly be older. There are several major plumbing issues that need to be addressed before they move in.

And since we decided to wall off a little studio apartment for ourselves (the two smallest rooms in the house and a bathroom about the size of a postage stamp), the first order of the day was to get a functioning toilet in what would be our bathroom. It used to have a toilet but it broke and we never replaced it and ended up using the second bathroom as a storage closet for our camping and boating stuff.

So. That is what we did this week. We took the toilet out of the one bathroom and moved it over to our bathroom. You'd think that it would just be simpler to go buy a new toilet except that we had to take it out anyway because it had sprung a leak at the bottom and rotted out the floor underneath. It was like being on a rocking horse. So now we can repair the floor in the other bathroom and then put a new toilet in there.

I say we, Marc did it except for an occasional hand from me. He also repaired the pipe from the sink in what had been the laundry room and is now to become our little kitchenette (hot plate, coffee maker, and sink). It was rotted out and just drained under the house. Now it drains into the sewer line.

I wouldn't want you to think that I was just lolling around waiting to lend a hand, I was out clearing out the ditch in front of the house which had become overgrown, filled with leaves, and filling in with wild petunias. I do love the mexican wild petunias, they are kind of old fashioned and when they go through their bloom cycle they are gorgeous. But they get tall and reedy and they are highly invasive and you can't just cut them down. You have to pull or dig them up. So that is what I did. I cleaned out the ditch.

We still have plumbing issues beyond the bathrooms and the sink. The kitchen sink is completely stopped up (which is why we don't cook there) and if you turn on the cold water you won't be able to turn it off. You can see, we have, ostrich-like, been ignoring the ancient plumbing for a long time.

Another thing on the to-do list is to hang a door between the kitchen and the back hall. Then we can each be completely closed off and our comings and goings will be easier and they won't have to host their parents/in-laws for three or four days every week (it could happen when we're working).

They are arriving the end of this month so I hope we can get all the basics, at least, fixed before their arrival but next week is spring break and the grandkids will be here Sunday thru Thursday. So, we'll see. We may be in each other's pockets for a few days.

city life too

It appears those two consecutive nights last week where the temperatures dipped to 30 just before dawn were enough to trigger some color in our deciduous trees.  The city is yellow and burnt orange for the most part except for when it is brown from the dead ones.  The tallows, the ornamental pears and the sweet gum throw some red and bright orange into the mix but its mostly a yellow and brown landscape.  The cypress are a mystery to me because they rightly turn brown and the needles fall.  But they also love water so I guess we won't really know if the cypress survived the drought until spring.

That little frost also took my pole beans even though I covered them.  And it nipped my zucchini, which I also covered, but didn't kill it.  It's in a big pot so I'm prepared to bring it in next time.  Get me a little grow light.

We're in town to do two small jobs.  One we finished up today and the other tomorrow.  But this long hot summer and lack of use required a half day of equipment repair.

Coming back into the city is always interesting.  While I was living there, changes were a little bit more gradual but not entirely.  Even then new construction would spring up whole and leave you trying to remember what had used to be there.

The city is finally repaving the two main arteries, the eastern and western boundaries, our N/S corridors.  In other words, I traveled on those two streets for practically everywhere I wanted to go.  Those were the two closest bridges over Buffalo Bayou, the only natural bayou left in the city (there are 4 major bayous passing through the city and I can name 8 in the larger metropolitan area).  

They have been needing to be repaved for many years but only now that the population density and per capita income in this part of town have both increased considerably has the city finally got around to it.  

I had occasion to go to a mall today, a very large mall, one that I haven't been to for a good many years.  It's a little farther than I ever wanted to go and it's also quite larger than it was last time I went.  I was taking my twin grandgirls to get their hair cut at the place of their choice but this isn't really about that.

It's about all the stuff that is for sale, everyone vying for those dollars.  As if the number of stores itself wasn't overwhelming enough, all the corridors were filled with carts and kiosks and they are all selling stuff!  I couldn't even look at it.  So much totally useless stuff when you really stop to think about it, whose sole purpose in being is to generate the transfer of cash from one pocket to another.  

Although I did see a very cool remote control helicopter that flew and hovered and the operator had it fly right to his hand where he plucked it out of the air.  I kept walking.  We were on a mission, not to be delayed or sidetracked.

The twins got their haircuts, had ice cream and a pretzel, we browsed Claire's, and made it back to the truck in an hour and a half.  Not bad.

Tomorrow we go home.  The cat will be glad.  She was starting to disbelieve in the existence of the dog and was wanting out.  We wouldn't let her out and a little while ago her faith was restored when the dog started barking and making his presence known.

city livin'

If I needed a reminder about why I moved out of the city, I certainly got one this trip...rude drivers who will happily let you change lanes as long as you do it behind them, road construction that narrows busy three lane roads with merging traffic down to one lane, and huge helicopters that hover over the house at night with searchlights while sirens blare from who knows how many cop cars while they conduct their manhunt.

Made me think of several apocalyptic sci-fi books and movies. We all laughed when 1984 came and went but the joke's on us. Big Brother is watching and there is no escape. They were probably after some little 6 yr. old boy for playing doctor with his 5 yr. old girl playmate while the real crooks and criminals get off scott free.

Well, good things are here too...getting to spend time with friends I don't see very often now, lots of choices for places to eat out, stores that have what you need without having to drive 25 - 50 miles, my daughter and grandkids.

Driving in past Memorial Park you could see that they have been cutting down the dead trees. Whole stands of trees in undeveloped acreages across the city have died and many in residential areas as well. Over 6 million. That's 6,000,000. My four here at the city house are still living and I am amazed since we are not here to water them. One of them, the magnolia, we planted.