Alfie's Halloween

Some halloween shots. I promise the next post will be something art related :)

Alfie! Our Coton de Tulear

Meet our new puppy Alfie. I am getting absolutely nothing else done. (But it's awesome!)

The Autumn of the House Guests

I have been cleaning out my desk in preparation for my last (!) year at school which starts a week from today. I have found some strange and wonderful things in the large drawer of the desk that has been quietly 'catching all' for about a year now. I tried to shut it this morning and things started popping out the back (a pair of mittens, in fact) which is a pretty good sign that a cleanse is in order. Amongst at least a ten year supply of paper clips and page markers I found a crumpled copy of a short story that I had written for a class last year. The purpose of the story was to take one of the author's works that we had studied that year and write in their style. It is a fun little writing exercise if you ever want a challenge. I chose Gabriel Garcia Marquez's, "The Autumn of the Patriarch." If you haven't read it, the style consists of little punctuation, run-on sentences, time shifting and p.o.v. shifts. If you have the time, give it a read and let me know what you think of it!

The Autumn of the House Guests

We walked back into the house and turned both of the locks as an act of careful finality against the tirade of visitors that had just exited, leaving a feeling in the vestibule as if the air had been sucked out of everything by their newly created absence. We saw the destroyed kitchen up the stairs, a weekends’ worth of reveling in food splayed across the counters and the table in the form of broken plates, jam covered wine glasses, platters of spoiled fruit and meat, sticky fondue dishes, we smelled the acrid remnants of overflowing ashtrays, a suspicious tang emitting from the tall silver garbage bin, and overall, a faint hint of used baby diaper. In the living room, behind the kitchen, the remains of a couch cushion fort sagged sadly now that the three children had abandoned one of the many overly boisterous games they had relished in over the weekend while their parents sat sipping wine and miraculously ignoring the ear-splitting torrent their children rained down upon the house. We saw the box of crayons that had melted into our marble coffee table, the peanut butter edged fingerprints on the windows, the broken mirror poking out from behind an ill-chosen hiding spot, our pet cat Lucky cowering in the corner with eyes the size of saucers. We dared to go into the guest room hardly believing that the constant cacophony that had emitted from the house for over three days could truly be over, letting our nerves return to their un-jangled state. The room was in a disturbing state of disarray, the mattress had been flipped over and at some point had suffered a small fire, the dresser had been torn apart and used as a ladder/battering ram to create a small exit hole in the exterior wall which was the only one of the four that wasn’t missing the wallpaper in huge claw-marked stripes from floor to ceiling. I remember the old days when our friends had visited and it had been different, we spoke the same language of childless new home owners who enjoyed biking through wine country and listening to jazz in open aired band shells, now she sighed we would be lucky if a weekend consisted of a glass of wine in the basement and five episodes of the “Backyardigans.” Its worse than that he said on Saturday he told me they haven’t been to a restaurant in five years because the last time they went to one the children ate the table cloths while hanging from the chandeliers and formed a union amongst the kitchen workers and the police had to be called in to calm down the overly distraught owner who threatened to kill them all with his vast collection of kitchen knives. The mother of the children is a famed child psychologist who has written five books on how to raise children as well as one on dog grooming in a modern world, she said the proper way to raise children is to let them be themselves and never ever reprimand them because it could injure their budding personality, oh I agree with you totally my dear he said because it is the same philosophy I use to run my import/export business. We stared at them in wide eyed horror as the children tunneled under the hardwood floor in an attempt to capture Lucky who had just the night before begged us to never have children because she believed it would violate the pet/owner agreement we had signed when she was just a kitten. Remember when we used to go to that lovely restaurant Harbor 60 in Toronto and you would always order the prime rib with that lovely horseradish sauce and afterwards we would go and sing karaoke until we lost our voices and tried to tell the cabdriver where we lived in French because we thought he was from Quebec and the next day we would be happily embarrassed about the whole thing, I said trying to appeal to the oldest and dearest friend I thought might still be lurking inside of her somewhere, oh no she said I don’t remember that at all but then again my life from before seems so trivial now that I have children. The six year old glared at me while a cigarette dangled from her lips as she hugged our terrified cat closer to her chest while her three year old brother tried to wrestle a tattoo gun from the baby who was writing obscenities on the wall in what appeared to be blood. I wish you wouldn’t do that please we said in nervous unison as the ten year old beheaded our priceless collection of royal doulton china shepherdress’s with a blank look in his eyes while gyrating to heavy metal music that was pouring from the ceiling. I had hoped he yelled over the deafening music that had started to loosen the ceiling light fixtures that the triplets would have found jobs after university and moved out now that they are twenty three years of age but I guess this economy is difficult for young people to be independent in. We all smiled awkwardly at each-other and yearned for Sunday evening to come faster although only an hour had passed since they arrived, I don’t understand why they are so uncomfortable around our children she thought maybe because they don’t have any of their own poor dears and have never experienced the wonderful joys of having a young family. We kept circling around the house checking the locks on all of the doors and the windows while trying to contain bouts of hysteric nervous laughter that bubbled up in our throats now that they were gone for good we hoped to God. While I boarded up the holes in the guest room with the shattered remnants of the dresser he unplugged the phone lines and changed our e-mail addresses while the cat called a real estate agent from the hotel down the street we played salsa music and danced on the headless Royal Doulton Shepherdress’s remains that cheerfully crunched under our feet.
Sara Johnston.

By the way, I like kids, and I really enjoy when kids visit. (This is just in case any of my friends with children read this and try to interpret personal meaning into it. It's not about you. Stop being such a narcissist.)

And here is an interior shot of Boldt Castle (I don't think a post is complete without a picture) where I would like to live one day.

Happy Tuesday!

My Parent's Garden

My parents have always had a garden, but this year's has been the best (and the biggest) ever. They used the smallest field on the property that was once an apple orchard. When I was little, the orchard would flood every winter and we would skate between the apple trees. Here is a shot from the road in front of the property that pictures the whole acre of garden. As you can see, three quarters of it are sweet corn. Clicking on the pictures makes them super big.

A side view:

Gorgeous cabbages: The garden is organic; bugs are kept at bay by spraying the veggies with a mix of soapy water.

Eggplant:

Their flower gardens are not too shabby either:

A gratuitous shot of my parents snobby cat Mrs. Bigglesworth:
Don't you love the blue colour of the walls here? My mom mixes her own wall paint from leftover gallons of other people's projects. (Usually mine). I think this colour is a lovely
antique -y robins egg blue.
Happy Monday!

Gnome Home part 2

Look what I found on Etsy! This perfect little gnome world in a sphere was a kit made for me from this great Etsy shop.

Cotton and Wax

Whee! I am a featured artist on this site.
I feel very warm and fuzzies that Erin chose to profile me :)

I have been absent for a little bit from this blog for two reasons. The first: puppy pictures on kijiji. If you ever need another reason to question humanity check out the 'pets to give away' section. It is pretty disturbing. Anyways, we have been thinking about getting a puppy for a little while and are kind of enamored with these little guys. Does anyone have experience with these dogs?

The second reason I have been absent is because I am trying to teach myself to paint using encaustic wax. I am the type of artist who gets sidetracked easily by fancy mediums - I am pretty sure that I was a Magpie in a previous life. If it is horribly expensive, I feel that it might be the answer to any creative block I might be having. My idea is to use some of my photography such as this:


And coat it with several layers of clear wax to give it depth.
As well, I want to use some of my fabric webs in mixed media pieces with encaustic wax.

This sun-catcher was made using fabric, thread, and wash away stabilizer. Now I want to float it over other images in wax layers.
So far in my quest to conquer the art of encaustic wax I have destroyed my ironing board cover and my fabric cutting mat. (Remember when your Mom would say, "I wish you wouldn't play with that there? Sometimes I can hear my own Mom inside of my head...)
Hopefully I will be back soon with some sort of finished product photos. Or, more than likely, another new medium to mess around with.

Cougars and Cookies

At the end of April, in a fit of the winter blues/spring fever I bought a bike. An expensive one. My theory was that I would ride it to school every day in an attempt to shape up, save the environment, give my car a break, and save on gas money. The saved gas money was the justification for buying an expensive bike. Anyways, it is now July, and I have ridden the bike, oh...maybe, five times?
But, I mean, my excuses are really good. There are bugs outside. My classes go until nine thirty at night and I don't want to ride in the dark. There is a really brutal hill at the end of my street. And summer is hot. Well, other summers besides this one have been.
And there are signs like these on the trail:



I know a cougar wouldn't "technically" be interested in eating me, but if someone bigger than a small child or cat is going to die by cougar - it will be me. My luck is like that.

Here are some views I captured yesterday on bike ride #5 when I wasn't watching my back for sneaky cougars trying to get a bite of my butt sandwich.


And here are the cookies I made after the bike ride, destroying anything good the bike ride might have done for my body.
sigh.

These cookies are a staple item at our house because they are super easy and fast to make. I think it is just a basic, boring cookie recipe, but the results are tasty comfort food. Here is the recipe if you would like to try it out for yourself:

Anything Cookies

Mix:

1 cup butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
2 1/2 cups flour
1 Tbsp Baking Powder
Pinch of Salt

Add any of these ingredients:

chocolate chips
peanut butter
lemon
strawberries
oatmeal
raisins
Or almost any other cookie-ish ingredient.

Bake at 350.