look what i just won!!!!

thankyouthankyouthankyou  to Susan @ Phantasythat.   and i even managed to copy a picture of it to my little spot in the blogiverse.   life is good.  

i won this beautiful hand painted silk scarf for saying that the thing i would like to see happen to make the world a nicer place was the success of my obsession.  i'm a member of Habitat for Humanity in a nearby city, and i've been nagging my fellow board members for years to start a ReStore there.  for those who don't know what HFH and ReStores are, HFH uses volunteer labor and donated money, materials and skills to build homes for folks who, though hard working and deserving, can't qualify for a standard mortgage to buy a home.  they just don't make enough money.  the working poor.  the idea is that living in a safe, decent, affordable home can be a life changing experience for adults and children alike, and makes the world a better place.  everyone deserves a safe, decent, affordable place to live.  

ReStores are retail outlets for donated building materials, appliances, furniture..... anything that goes into building and maintaining a home.   they get donations of scratch and dent doors, windows, etc, discontinued lines of flooring, tiles, cabinets, ...... the list is endless.  and they sell them at bargain prices - some of these things are brand new!  all profits, after operating costs, go directly to Habitat for Humanity for the building of more homes.   prospective homeowners must contribute a certain number of 'sweat equity' hours in the construction of their homes, and they are given an interest free mortgage on the cost of the house, with payments scheduled according to their incomes.   ALL money payed into mortgages returns to the building fund, for more homes.  

since 1996 our HFH affiliate has produced homes for 9 families. not bad for a handful of very tired volunteers, doing our small part to make our corner of the world a better place.  just a month or so ago, i got permission to start research for a business plan for our very own ReStore, and if i do a good job of that, and we can manage to pull it off, i might just land the job of ReStore manager too!  this is one of my fondest dreams coming true!!!!   and i can't think of a lovelier way to celebrate it than with this gorgeous wearable art.  

cyberhug to Su

Kickass award

Susan @ phantasythat (see sidebar) has given me an award.  the kickass award.  i'm flattered.  if you know her blog, and most of those who visit me do know her blog.... you know why i'm flattered.  su has one kickass blog.   i don't have a lot to say about big issues, because it seems someone else has usually said it already, and said it better than i can.   i don't have the expertise or the time to develop it, to make my blog as nice to look at, with all the gadgets and links and goodies that many of my favorite spots to visit have, so mine is pretty simple.  in fact, i haven't even figured how to get the &%$#!?!  picture of the award to stick to my page.   i'm not particularly well travelled, or well read.....  but i guess there's something here, cuz there are some really cool people stopping by to chat.   

so thanks, Su.  and thanks to those of you who come by for the occasional visit.  life in the narrow minded, petroleum addicted frozen north is much improved by your friendship.

in comemoration, (or however you spell that) i'm attatching a picture of my daughter after she kicked ass on the paintball field at her younger brother's birthday party this summer..... because i can't get the danged award to cooperate, and i'm tired and want to go to bed.  

Tegan, 2008 national winner of the music festival association of Canada strings competition.  

i've been trippin'.   to Edmonton, capital city of the province of Alberta.  the annual national music festival finals were held there this year.  over 120,000 amateur musicians across Canada competed at the local level, to earn a chance to play in their provincial competitions.  the winners from each provincial competition were recommended to the national finals, held last week in Edmonton.  

competitions are not something i normally get excited about. i'm not a big fan of competitions between artists.   i encourage my students to compete, on the local level, to do their best, and sometimes they are recommended on to the next levels, but i tell them not to take it all too seriously.  a judge's opinion of how they play is, after all, only one person's opinion of how they played that particular piece at that particular time.   there's value in hearing what he or she has to say, but it's important to keep things in perspective.  it's all very subjective.   what's really important, i tell them, is the music, and conveying your love of it to the listener.  it's nice when they do well, but they should never let a disappointing outcome hinder their musical development, if that's where their hearts are.  

i taught Tegan for a number of years when she was very young. she was one of those who consistently did well at competitions. she has been a national finalist before; this was not her first national competition.  i think it was held in Halifax last year. this year the event was being held within accessible driving distance.  Edmonton was do-able, so i made the trip, with a good friend of mine, who used to accompany Tegan on piano, to lend support and hear her play again.  Tegan is now 18, living in southern alberta, and has been getting instruction from top string players all over the world these past few years.   really a remarkable girl in many ways, she's developed an amazing network of peers and mentors, and remains very down-to-earth and earnest.  she feels the responsibility that goes with her gift and takes nothing for granted.  

her mother told me the story of how she got the instrument she's holding in this picture.  after learning, and excelling on violin for 10 years or so, she tried viola, and discovered an immediate affinity with the instrument. she was looking to buy a really nice viola; the one she had been playing was a rental.  in this particular luthier's shop, she played the more conventional models on display, putting them through their paces as is the custom, and concentrating on the tone and responses of each one.  after listening and watching for a while, the luthier slipped into the back room, returning shortly with this - an asymmetrical work of art with a carven rose for a scroll.... and a luscious, gentle tone that's hard to forget once you've heard it.  it brought me to tears listening to Tegan play her solo on it.  after she had begun to play it, her mother tells me, the viola's creator turned to his assistant, and said softly, "it's found a home."  he then sold it to her for significantly less than the ticketed price.  

Tegan is the first violist ever to win this competition; since the inception of the music festival association early in the 20th century,  first place has always gone to a violinist or a cellist.   there's a stereotype in orchestral circles that the best violists are musicians who weren't quite good enough to be the best violinists.  it's not true, but stereotypes are like that.  she's proving them wrong.  

i wish i could take more credit for helping to produce that unforgettable music, but my contribution was at the very early stages, when only a few of us saw the large gift in the small girl.  fully developing a gift like that requires more skill and experience than i have to offer, so i recommended her to my betters when the time came, and happily became one of her many groupies.  i do take some small pride in the knowledge that she had got the good start she needed.  i'm told she had no bad habits to break, or sloppy technique to correct when she went on to the next teachers.  

she's beginning university this fall at a major music school, with a nice fat scholarship.  all of her groupies are expecting great things from her.  

taming the wilderness

home sweet elderly home. she's 78 years old this year, with hand hewn beams supporting the floors. i know that's not much of an age in many places, but here in northern Alberta, that's a very old home. this was one of the earliest homes built here; she had no running water or power when she was first built, and she's one of very few of the earliest structures remaining. my realtor buddy tells me i'm a sucker for old stuff. he could be right. the front yard, seen above, is quite shady. there's a line of mature pine trees along the boulevard, and on the right of the shot above, you can see the trunk of the manitoba maple that holds court over the southeast corner of the lot. with much coaxing i've managed to convince a few lavatera and delphiniums to survive in the shattered clay soil along the foundation. only a few anemic dandelions were making an effort to live there last year.

also last year, the back yard, seen in the next shot, was a lumpy expanse of overgrown wild grasses and ruts. there was a swooning old coal shed crumbling into heaps of broken glass, old car parts and splintered wood along the alley. gradually, i've cleared away the mess, filled the ruts, run my old reel-type push mower over the grass, and there are raised beds sprouting from the ruins. i layered the beat up cardboard boxes from the move on the ground to smother the grass and clover, then parked the beds atop them and filled them with a mix of earth and sand. they're planted with beans and lettuce, tomatoes, chard, carrots and peas. and flowers. the plan is to layer more discarded cardboard, etc between the beds, and heap it with straw or sawdust or whatever's available to make the paths between beds as low maintenance as possible. and a few more beds as i can manage them, till there's no grass left. i don't like lawns. with the dry weather we've had, the grass isn't doing well, so the deep rooted clover that was skulking beneath it now has the advantage. i procrastinate about mowing now. the bees love the clover blossoms, and so do i. i don't think the neighbors are quite as fond of it as we are.

twitchy mouse

we've been having a lot of trouble with our digital oilfield accounting application of late. the cursor freezes at unexpected and unpredictable times, or leaps randomly around the screen, even when no one is handling the mouse. being the brilliant techno-whiz that i am, i've discerned the problem. it's fleas. so i've issued a flea collar to all the mice in the office.

:o)

Yukon River; Galena Creek

for 6 years, the 2 eldest children and i lived in the Yukon.  if you like unsullied wilderness, and if seriously, even dangerously serious sub-zero temperatures don't worry you unduly, the Yukon is pretty close to heaven.  

galena is a mixture of nickel, silver and lead.  there's a lot of mining in the Yukon - or there was when i lived there.  Gold, of course, and silver, copper, nickel and asbestos come immediately to mind.  but the Yukon is mostly undeveloped.  there's one real city in the whole territory - Whitehorse, the capital.  Dawson City hasn't been a city since the gold rush at the end of the 19th century. these days, i think the winter population is just over a thousand lost souls.  in the summer, with tourism, which is the Yukon's main industry, the population mushrooms.  but in the case of Dawson City, gold city has morphed into tourist town.   so there are only a few paved highways, and not a whole lot of roads of any kind, except in the near vicinity of one of its few, and sparsely populated towns.  a good bit of the transportation there is still done by river, or by air.   

in about our 3rd year of residence in heaven-on-ice, i took a position working for a trapper who needed someone to keep house for him, and care for his 3 year old daughter, Annie.  as my eldest was then 3, and i knew the fellow to be a pretty decent sort, i signed on for the winter.  the cabin where we would stay was on the banks of the Yukon River, at the mouth of Galena Creek, about 35 miles upstream from Dawson City.  someone found galena there once, and named the place accordingly, but it wasn't a rich enough deposit to be worthwhile developing in such an isolated place.   when living in a wilderness situation, i've always liked being upstream of a main centre.  if need be, one can float down the river for help. the prospect of having to find my way upstream if the outboard motor on the boat were to fail worried me.  still does.   

so trapper Roger and i, with his 3 year old Annie, my 3 year old Mitchell and my 10 month old Raven, met one overcast October morning at the dock in Dawson City to make arrangements to take his small boat 35 miles up the Yukon River to his home at Galena Creek.  an hour or so before departure time, he handed me a $100 bill, and said,

 "Maybe you should pick something up for supper." 

 this was 1979. i'd never seen a $100 bill before ... i've seen precious few since.    after a few questions, i understood that he didn't expect me to outfit the crew for the winter.... just pick up some meat and a few things that could be made up quickly for supper.  which i did.  hamburger, maccaroni & cheese, and some canned veggies.  in the bush, where there are no deep freezes or microwaves, this constitutes fast food.  since that time, in retrospect, i've come to believe that the $100 bill was a bit of a test. whether or not i passed the test you are soon to discover.  

traveling 35 miles in october on a large river in a small, uncovered boat may be a pleasant way to spend the day in some parts of the world.  this is not the case on the Yukon River.  by October there's ice starting to form along the edges, the water is filled with shards that have broken from the edge, and air temperatures are hovering around the freezing point.   as we motored abreast of  forbidding rock faces and around islands bereft of greenery, small chunks of ice brushed against the keel of the boat. the low-hanging clouds began to drip sleet.  Annie and Mitchell were so bundled in hats and scarves, mitts, parkas and blankets, that, if they did complain during the trip, we couldn't hear them.   Baby Raven, in a green corduroy 'snugglie' child carrier, zipped close inside mum's parka, and topped off with a thick wooly hat, gave up arguing when she discovered she couldn't move, and slept the 3 or 4 hours of the trip.  with the wind and the sleet and the immobility of hunching against the wind against stinging sleet nerveless bums wedged together on hard, narrow wooden thwarts , by the time we arrived at our destination, we were all close to hypothermic.  

the cabin was a low roofed 3 room log builing, heated by wood.  the 5o gallon water barrel next to the wood burning cookstove was topped off daily, by Roger, from the crystal clear ice water of the Yukon River. from September till June it was crystal clear, that is....  the rest of the year it was murky with the silt carried off the melting glaciers, by the White River some miles upstream.  Roger had one small room, the children had another, and i was mistress of the largest room - kitchen, dining and living room, with a daybed that served as couch half time, and my bed the other half.  the only door in the place was between us and the wilderness outside.  closed doors inhibit the circulation of air (and heat) through a building with central heating, so the bedrooms had doorways, but no doors.  

by River Rat standards of the day, this was a ritzy place.  well chinked, warm and dry with a sheet metal roof and FIVE glass windows with sliders and screens!  separate rooms!  and real linoleum on the floor!  there were even kitchen cabinets, that ran the full length of one side of my domain, with DOORS on every one o them!  the opposing wall was lined with bookshelves, full of books! and there was a 2-way radio tucked tidily in one corner of the same shelf, connected by wires to a car battery which sat beside it.  i'd even noticed what i suspected was an electric wringer washing machine under a tarp beneath the overhang of the roof on the front porch.  which promised the existence of a power generator. the yard was tidy, and mowed!  half the people in town didn't mow their yards.... no one in the bush did.... no one except Roger.  across the yard was a screened outbuilding filled with metal bins for bug and mouse-proof food storage, and a haunch of moose hanging from the ridgepole.   a meander along the tidy trail to the outhouse disclosed a toilet seat covered in the fur of a lynx too damaged to sell because the squirrels found it before the trapper did.  

when we first stumbled in, numb with cold and damp, the place was dark and chill. the fire had gone out days before.  Roger lit the coleman lamp suspended by a hook and wire from the peak of the roof.  my first sight of inside of the place was of an old-fashioned Alladin oil lamp standing at pride of place in the centre of a 6 seat dining table. the eating surface of this table was made of 3 inch slabs of spruce, sanded and varnished to a sheen. there were matching chairs whose legs and back supports were of peeled and varnished willow limbs. i set to work lighting a fire in the cook stove, then the Fisher wood stove next to that.   fingers numb, the first match broke in my hands without so much as a spark.  but i was more gentle with the second, and as the flame slowly curled up the paper, and the kindling started to crackle, with hands shaking with the cold, i fed larger sticks into the fire.   when the tops of the stoves had built up some heat and begun to radiate, i unwrapped the many layers on the children, replaced damp clothing with dry, and began to plan dinner. 

as i pulled the hamburger from the grocery bag, the till tape fluttered to the counter.  which reminded me that i hadn't given Roger the change from his $100 bill. i'd spent less than $10.  remembering this, i slipped the raw meat out of its cellophane tray into a frying pan that had warmed on the stove. as it began its satisfying, meaty sizzle, i then reached with my right hand into the pocket of my still damp jeans for the bills. i had the meat wrapper in my left hand, and the cash in my right.  as i said to Roger, "here's your change"  i hooked an available finger of my left hand which wasn't busy holding the meat wrapper, to open the Fisher stove. a roaring fire now filled its belly.  i turned to him, and in one graceful, fluid movement, threw the contents of my right hand into the stove, and handed Roger the contents of the left.  

surely i was hypothermic, for i stared, dumfounded, at the bloody plastic in his hand, and wondered, "where in the world did he get that?"   he, however, being well over 6 feet tall, to my 5 1/2 feet, having more body mass, was less damaged by the cold, and in full possession of his wits. he lurched past me, thrust his arm, at something approaching the speed of light, into the inferno, and deftly nabbed the $92  i'd offered to the fire gods before they were even warm.  if i have ever been telepathic, it was at that moment.  as clearly as if he had said it out loud, i heard him think, "Dear God, what have i brought into my home?!"

to Roger's credit, he didn't fire up the boat and take me back to Dawson the next morning.  the meal i prepared met expected standards, and i didn't appear to be a child beater, so he took a calculated guess that his home and family weren't threatened. i spent a most pleasant winter keeping house for them, and we both felt a twinge of regret when i returned to to Dawson the following spring.

but, to the best of my recollection, Roger NEVER again left me in charge of money.