Watermelons, chocolate-dipped strawberries, and mojitos during a heatwave made my second summertime birthday.  Walking back from the restaurant on the corner of our street that night, there was a downpour with thunder & lightening and a hot pavement smell.  I like the alignment of months and seasons much better here than the southern hemisphere!

One of my strawberry plants has a flower… now I just have to keep the pigeons away from it.

I got an ugly haircut from an awkwardly silent, overpriced, rock and roll hair-cutter with a greasy mullet this week. I tried to fix it up myself with some sewing scissors and a razor. I’ve got a lot of nice hair-ties and it is hot enough to want to wear your hair up all the time.

It is really hot and humid this weekend. We got sent home from work early on Friday because the air-conditioning was broken and people were sweating all over their work. I wish the pools were open but they don’t fill them with water until school ends, which is the end of June. The kids downstairs have a paddling pool under some trees – if only the lake wasn’t polluted! It probably isn’t even that bad. I’ve heard all the public pools around the place stay open until midnight when there is a heatwave or humidindex warning.

Look at my plants – there are strawberries in there as well now. I felt happy about my little garden this week – there are lots of bugs in there and spider webs.

We went to a church fair this morning. I got a box of buttons and some hankies, the buttons are making me feel like sewing something. I’ve picked out my favourites in the picture below. I’m thinking I’ll make the big brown one on the right into a hair-tie, to enhance my aforementioned hair.

I have no idea what I am going to do with these hankies, except not put boogas on them. These are from a couple of church fairs. I think they’re very pretty, especially the one on the far right and the yellow flowers one. Maybe I’ll collect enough to make into a big quilt one day. I guess they could be too delicate.

I should have thought a bit harder about this posting everyday thing. It is almost dark and I’ve just go home and haven’t thought to take any photos of my neighbourhood. I went to listen to a rally about uranium mining in First Nations communities. Some of the elders and leaders from the communities were put in jail for peacefully protesting uranium mining on their land, which is polluting their water with things that cause cancer, like Cadmium (like on Erin Brokivich). There is an old law in Ontario that allows any company to mine land, regardless of who owns it - you own the land on top but nothing underneath the surface. It can affect any land owner, but is especially impacting on First Nations communities that live on land with uranium deposits.

Thunder is rolling in now – it is hot and muggy and has been heading for rain all day. I don’t have time to go out and photo anything so here is a dark thunder-lit photo of my new paints and some pictures from my day in the park yesterday.

This was my favourite guy at the Blue Jays game last Tuesday.  He’s Stewart.

Last night we went with Eddie and Ed to watch Liam Finn and EJ someone play at El Mocambo, which I had walked past a few times and always imagined to be a biker bar, which it may have been.   There were not many people there.  Maybe fifty?  Maybe less.  Liam and EJ were both very exciting to watch – it was their last night of their tour and Liam made me think of a rock and roll castaway with a lot of energy and a felt hat, and EJ was very beautiful and good at using the loop machine, which probably has a more technical name that I don’t know.  At the end Liam ripped the microphone out of the plug, accidentally, and it was a wonderful finish.

I spent today in Kensington Markets buying vegetables and cheese, and the afternoon with Mark in the Park — reading books and trying out my new paints and getting a tiny bit sunburned.  I planted hummingbird attracting plants in my window box, which is growing pretty well so far, and then caught up on sleep on the fold out couch with the doors open and a nice spring breeze.

I am going to post everyday this week.  I thought I’d post some photos of things around my neighbourhood.

These are my favourite photos from our trip to Ottawa last week. I had to do a presentation for work so we decided to go for a few days and look around at the capital city. A highlight was walking across a bridge from the province of Ontario to Quebec, and an unplanned tour of Indian mystic buffets. It rained almost the whole time we were there, until we got on the train to go home. I spent the train rides reading a fantastic book and watching out the window at the beautiful fields and forests with snow. Last week also marked the first consistently warm temperatures and the dusting off of my bike. SPRING!

I haven’t been making much lately. Though, for Christmas this year I got a kit for making sock creatures. I’ve made two – here is one inspired by My Neighbour Totoro and a lonely bedsock whose other half is probably under a bed or couch in one of the many places I stayed during our visit back home.

Washing on the line;

Swans and icicles;

A man paddling out to ’sea’ in the cold;

Retreating snow;

Smooth glass and crockery collected from the beach;

There is no sign of spring, the snow and ice are still packed high and the trees are still black silhouettes. The chipmunks are still asleep, under the ground I think. I saw a display at the science museum, in Boston, and showed all these little creatures sleeping in burrows under the ground. The way I remember it, which is quite likely embellished, there were snakes and frogs and all sorts of things buried under the ground like bulbs waiting for spring. Quite scary when you see how deep the ice and snow are in the park. How do they breathe in winter? I can see how winter was seen as the grand death in the olden days.

February is over though, with its extra (un-paid) day. I’m HAPPY to see March and to start thinking about seeds to buy for the window box and to remember how trees have green leaves and to start to anticipate things coming alive again, skinny and skulking out of their hiding places. Soon, I won’t need these boots.

This Lion here feels that winter is about as fun as a poke in the eye with an icicle. He also hates his snowy fringe (or bangs as the ‘mericans say) and wishes someone would brush him off.

It had been deadly cold and the snow keeps coming. I still stop to see the shapes of the snowflakes on my scarf when I am outside and I enjoy walking to work and saying ‘hi’ to the people out and about early in the morning, especially the old Irish punk with his cane and grey dog.

I am thinking about being warm though, and the colours that come back in summer. Winter is all white, grey, and black. Yellow is the colour of the month inside. YELLOW! It makes going to the Goodwill store easier if you just search for a colour. Here is my new yellow top, and the start of a yellow quilt for our bed. I wanted a quilt that I wouldn’t have to sew up much but could spend lots of time decorating and quilting – I love these ones.

Our holiday to Montreal was a beautiful start to 2008. I got time to write letters and postcards on the train trip there (we’ll see how long it takes me to actually mail them),  while watching the expanse of snowy fields with lonely houses speed by outside the window.

It is nice to start the year with firsts – I saw my first ever woodpecker, cross-country skied for the first time (which resulted in face-first crashes into snow, tangled skis and limbs as soon as we worked out how to get them on our feet), and was the coldest I have ever been in my life (-24).

I also ate at my first french restaurant. So I have a nice holiday to remember as I wake up three hours earlier than usual to start back at work!

I have lots of good plans and hopes for this year and am going to try to fit them in around working and organising the last stages of my thesis. I’ve written them all down in a list with little tick boxes because I just like doing things like that. I’ll have to look back at the list I made at new year last year…

We had a snow storm today, with thunder and lightening and winds blowing huge flakes around. I spent the morning lying in bed watching it all fall outside our window, lunch time building a snow cave and pouring boiling maple syrup onto the snow to eat, and the afternoon flying down the big basin in the park using a plastic bag, and sometimes Mark’s back. I have some big snow boots now so my feet were toasty warm. I got icicle dreads in my hair, and a face full of snow, but tobogganing is so fun! The photos are a bit fuzzy but you can see how much snow there was outside our bedroom door.

We have our tree up now too. It is a little bit of a Charlie Brown one, but smells lovely and Christmasy.

I think (touch wood) we might have a white Christmas!