The most magical time of the year

Coronation grape harvest!!!


You can only buy these babies in late summer, and the seedless variety is only available in small quantities (in the grocery stores near me, at least) so the one-and-a-half pints left in my 'frig are probably the last ones I'll see till next year, but

ohhhhhhhh

they are delicious. Everything a grape should be.

Apparently you can use them in recipes, but I can't see my supply lasting long enough to get through making a single one of them. Definitely takes the sting out of watching summer end, don't you think?

Standard of living

Forts from the War of 1812 attracted a lot of my time this past August, and since I had a new camera (the original not-so-fab one making the unfortunate acquaintance of certain flagstone paving at high velocity this past July) I took a lot of pictures in them.

Reviewing these ones, taken at Fort Erie in Ontario, I was struck by the things that don't change, whether your life is civilian or military, or unfolds through 2009 or 1812.

We all need ways to pass the time, and they don't have to be fancy: a few rocks will do.


We need healthy boundaries, with some doors for give and take.


A quiet place to rest is important.


Some places are, of course, nicer than others, and it is always striking when the nicer places are not only nicer, but all devoted to the comfort of one person rather than sixty (the straw bed above having been taken in the soldiers' barracks, a solitary single in a crowd of bunks.)


Still, a good view is free to all.


As long as nobody is firing into your vantage point.

How to get a bigger house

Get rid of stuff.

Isn't that crazy?

Ever since I was an executor a few years back for the estate of two very packratty people, I was scared straight about accumulating stuff and seriously cut back on my second-hand-shop-shopping. Even so, I've managed to fill the last three weeks with the largest-scale shedding in the history of my life. And that, my friends, is saying something.

Among the stuff I sent on its way:

my daily planners from 1991 through 1993 (though I'm sure my biographers will curse me for this when writing about my creative life once I am gone, being left with no other way to determine the precise days on which I took individual days off work)

an inadvertent collection of keychains

a rather nice-but-needing-refinishing oak table shelf thingy which I repurposed from its job of 'holding junk up off the floor' in the storage zone to an exciting new one of 'holding junk up off the floor' in the living room

a truly eye-popping series of inkless pens


What I am left with, I'm in the process of redistributing. My former work area, aka the dumping ground for 15-year-old stuff from jobs almost as distant, is morphing (much like the aforementioned creative life) into a sewing/craft/giftwrapping area, whereas my china cabinet appears to be turning into - prepare yourself - a china cabinet.

I read in one of the magazines I unearthed (and then shot into recycling) that clutter happens when you don't have designated homes for everything in said clutter. Designate homes: all you have to do is maintain them. And darned if you don't get a bigger home of your own for your trouble.

Weekend reading

I have a great family, one of whom is a cousin living far away - one of those people you particularly wish didn't, because she's always introducing me to wonderful things that I wouldn't otherwise know about.

Well, just now she's in town, and she brought me books!


The House by the Thames views nearly 450 years of London history from the lens of a particular house and the people who lived in it over that time - a fascinating concept and one I can't wait to dive into.

War in Val D'Orcia is the diary of Iris Origo, an English woman who married an Italian landowner and was raising their family there when WWII pitted his country against hers. Apparently she helped to save many lives and again... can't wait.

I wouldn't want to be able to read three books at once because none of them would last long enough, but... The Morville Hours is also tugging at me. It traces the year in a garden at a house in the English countryside through the format of a medieval Book of Hours, and its author was a rare-book librarian before she became a full-time gardener and writer. I know the journey through this book will be sufficiently intriguing to feed positive dreaming and peaceful enough to lead me to sleep.

So much better than the ghost story collections I've been scaring myself with the last few sleepless night, don't you think?

Whew

It's so nice to sit down. I've been cleaning house all day! Dusting mostly, after clearing out old paper and making big gaps for new stuff that's sure to come in. Sometime I really must track where all that paper comes from. I have a big recycling bucket just inside the door and I try to get as much in there right away of what's going to be going in eventually, but it it doesn't seem to help much.

The good news is that I unearthed some magazines I've been wanting to read and couldn't find (plus some others I totally forgot I had.) So now that I've earned a break, I can sit down and enjoy them. Outside maybe, where it's sunny and not too hot! Oh, how I love September... after the cleaning is done.

School bag

I am so excited about back-to-school!

Even though I am not going back to school and also, even though I didn't know I was excited until I walked into a brick-and-mortar store yesterday and saw all the products for fall, like wool leggings and fabulous eco-friendly book bags from Matt and Nat:


To my credit, I did not buy a tailored plaid jacket or a tailored plaid skirt or even socks. I deserve chocolate for that, right?

Rocks, part one

I'm not talking about Charlie Brown at Halloween, either.

I just love a rocky landscape or shoreline, but I'm partial to stone walls as well, and carvings in same. Here are some shots I took at the parliament buildings in Ottawa last month:






Wouldn't it be nice to have stuff like that in the corners of the walls inside a house? The kind you could afford to live in and heat, I mean?