A host of golden daffodils

This is the view from my back window a little over two months ago.


Yes, those are ICICLES!

Now, spring is fully sprung.


I love all spring flowers, but the ones that really do it for me are the daffodils.
I can't see one without thinking of the Wordsworth poem:

I wander'd lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

My Mum has a keen eye for beauty and she almost always misquoted this poem when she saw daffodils.

A tradition I have continued.

EEEEK! Part 3

Not to beat the subject to death.
Ouch. Probably not the best turn of phrase.
It's 10am and I just found another dead mouse.
On the TOP SHELF of the bookcase.
Intrepid husband is at work.
Elder son is barely awake.
I know.
I just woke him up.
It will take great presence of mind to ignore the dead mouse until someone brave can dispose of IT.

I wonder how many more meeses there are.

EEEK! Part 2

Ding, dong, the mouse is dead!
Poor little thing never stood a chance.
He was duly disposed of this morning by my intrepid husband.
Plastic-bagged and rubbish-binned.
Plastic-bagged due to the infamous "dead blue jay and maggots" incident of last summer.
Which I hope to never repeat.

I will not subject you to a photo of said dead mouse.

EEEK!!!!

There's a mouse in the house.
Or, as my Scottish grandfather used to say, there's a moose in the hoose.
Actually, I never had a Scottish granddad.
I never knew any of my grandparents, which speaks something to my desire to be the world's best nana.
Have I mentioned that before?

Anyway, back to the moose.
It's probably not as cute as this one.
It probably has much bigger teeth and scary claws.


Jeff has been telling me for some time that he wakes up at night and hears scrabbling.
I put it down to an overactive imagination.

Until Thursday night, when we had put our tired selves to bed and were hunkering down for our long winter's nap.
All was quiet, except for the TV in the family room.
(Annie had shown up for the evening and outlasted us.)
Suddenly, we hear a "scratch, scratch, scratch" coming from the vicinity of my nightstand.
We couldn't believe our ears.
It was spooky.
Jeff leapt out of bed, (okay, lumbered) and stomped around to my side of the bed. The mouse (oh, please let it only be a mouse) was forewarned, of course, and was nowhere to be found. Although some major dust bunnies and apparently yummy-smelling candy wrappers were very revealing of some of my most shameful habits.
End of mouse story for the day, as we nervously fell sleep.

Last night, Friday, Jeff was watching one of the "Mummy" movies in the rec room.
I was ensconced on the family room couch watching "Friday Night Lights," my favourite show.
A sad statement in and of itself.
Jeff came running into the room, announcing that he'd heard our little friend again.
"Oh, good," I thought, "at least he's not in the house."
The little beggar had made a meal of my gourd from Peru, eating off some of the decorative corn. He also (why do I keep saying "he?") ate some of my instruments and left little turds in a box and on the TOP SHELF of the bookcase.
How do mice climb to the top shelf, tell me that!
He left a nice little pile of rice in the corner of the bottom shelf.
WHICH WE DID NOT CLEAN UP!

This morning the pile was gone.
Spooky.
And we can't find it either.
That was one busy little mouse last night.
Today, I spent an inordinate amount of time cleaning my bedroom (scary how dust accumulates when you're not looking) and buying mousetraps at Freddie's.

Look out, little mouse, your days are numbered.

Now, let's hope he doesn't find my chocolate stash in the spare bedroom!

Some thoughts on pain

Don't be scared, it's not totally depressing.
Just grit your teeth and read on....

This is me, on that fateful day in September 2007, halfway up Mount St. Helens.
Blissfully unaware of what would follow.


It has been 18 months since I broke my leg. Eighteen months of fairly unrelenting pain.
I have spent a lot of time, money, and energy in trying to figure out a way to get rid of the pain.
Acupuncture.
Physical therapy.
Yoga.
Kick-boxing.
More surgery to remove the hardware.
Attempting to walk through the pain in the hope that if I walk enough it will go away.
You have to understand, it isn't just my leg that hurts. It's my foot, my ankle, my other leg, and both of my hips as well, as they compensate for the bad leg.
And the pain isn't just announcing itself when I am using my leg.
It's there when I sit on the couch.
It's nagging at me when I am lying in bed, so that I toss and turn and can't get comfortable.
Pain has become my ever-present friend.
Not really interesting enough to talk about unless someone happens to ask me, "How is your leg?"
Then, when I tell them, I sense that it makes them uncomfortable to think about it.
I understand that. It's like when I used to watch my Mum silently wringing her hands because of arthritis pain. It used to make me almost angry because I couldn't do anything about it. I didn't want to think about it. Now I have my own arthritis pain and somehow it's easier.
But for me, strangely, pain has become my constant companion. It tells me I am still here, still fighting the good fight to get back to what I once was. So I don't hate it. I'm not even angry about it.

Then, suddenly, about two days ago, I noticed that my ankle hardly hurts any more.
My hip doesn't hurt when I walk.
Not even up the crazy hills this morning, thank you Brenda.
Weird.
Was it the upward-facing dog that I finally pulled off in yoga class on Tuesday evening?
Or was it just persistence and the healing power of time?
I don't know.

But I think I like it.

This I love...

One of the best things about spending a good part of my life teaching people of various talent and willingness to play the piano, is that eventually I got to teach my own grand-daughter.
Somehow, it's much easier than when I taught my four children.

McKenzie listens to me.
She has conversations about why she likes this piece and why that one is hard.
She hums along to the songs she likes.
She is polite.
She loves me.
We don't yell at each other.

I am always second-guessing myself on my parenting. I wish I had done "this" better, or not done "that" at all. Piano lessons were a kind of microcosm of our relationships with each other. And while I am sure my kids would have their own versions of why taking piano lessons from Mom was horrible, it was partly those experiences that got us to where we are today. Now we can (mostly) laugh about it.

And while they don't all play the piano today, they all found instruments to love and music is a big part of their lives.

So there must have been something good.

Wheeee!

We spent the weekend in Southern California with Charlie.
We flew JetBlue, my new favourite airline.
They serve SNACKS.
As many as you want.
The blue potato chips are particularly scrumptious.


On Saturday, Adam and Shelley (Charlie's new surrogate parents) took us on an adventure. We test-drove one of these.
It's called a SPYDER.


Here's the proof.


We each had our own bike and rode in a convoy, up in the hills above Temecula, for about 30 minutes.
It was absolutely STOOPENDOUS!

Jeff always said he would never buy a motorbike.

Then a few years ago he allowed as he might be talked into a trike.

Do we see a pattern here?