Bronwyn Answers!

Bronwyn finally answered my email. I’m very happy and relieved. It means she can tidy up my beds and I can focus on the wood for next Winter. And more good news: I. heard from the BC Ministry of Finance, confirming my registration for the Fuel Tax Refund Program for Persons with Disabilities. 

Yesterday was a thoroughly wonderful day. Even watering the gardens was a joy because it was 22° by noon and watering is so easy compared to sawing and stacking. I began with the backyard. It takes me about 45 minutes to do just the backyard beds, and then I was able to plant some Dill in the herb garden. My essentials are Thyme, Mint, Cilantro, Chives, Dill and Oregano, and I’ve been searching for a Dill starter for weeks. I have other herbs, but they are less in demand.

Mid-day, I did something I love to do—rather, I tried to. I got out my recliner chair, set it up in the sunshine and got comfortable, but it was too hot to stay in the sun. I came back inside and wrote to the Mid Island Co-op from whom I buy all my gas. I asked for a summary of my gas purchases for the past 4 years. I am hoping their summary will suffice to get a refund on my past 4 years of gasoline. I’m eligible for the refunds, but I don’t have the actual receipts and without them, I can’t get a refund.

Next, I wrote a letter to Coast Capital where I get my insurance, and then I went into the village and their offices to use it to get refunds on my annual insurance underway. With their help, the Ministry will refund 25% of my annual insurance for the past four years. And once that was done, her Highness and I went for our afternoon walk. I must confess that this mild heat did not bring the joy that I expected. I’ve been waiting for warm weather forever, but now that it’s here, I’m wanting to cool down.  The heat is tiring, and I sweat, but I know I’ll get used to the heat and come to love it.

I came home and quickly got into the spa; then I came in to read a little. I haven’t read much since the onset of good weather. Then I ordered 3 cords of wood, had dinner, watched some TV and then went to bed early. All in all, it was a very lovely day. And I shall use the excuse of impending wood stacking to rest until it arrives on Monday morning.

I’m not dreading the stacking. I’ve miraculously achieved some kind of Zen approach to hard physical labour. I do it at the pace that is comfortable. There is no hurry. It’s the same with the watering, and a bit like walking with Sheba. In all these physical activities, the mind can go wherever it wants while the body continues to move in autopilot.   

My garden continues to impress me and to bring me pride and joy. It’s exploding with green, and soon cascading yellow waterfalls of Laburnum blossoms will be the focus of the garden. I am thrilled with the natural surface of the land. Last night I when I was reading on the chaise beside the big living room window, I put my book down and watched the Robins catching their worms, and the Bees on the carpet of tiny wildflowers in the front yard. It’s much, much more interesting than a lawn, and as beautiful.

I was prepared to go to fitness this morning, but I can’t go on Monday, so I’m going to wait until next Friday to resume my torture routine. I’ve many chores to do at Pinecone Park. I’ve to clear space for the incoming wood in the shed, and I’ve watering to do.

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Sawing & Stacking.

Wednesday was a gorgeous day. I Was out working in the yard long before it was time to meet our friends for our dog walking together. Then we came home, and Sheba rested after our walk, whereas I got my chainsaw and got to work on the hefty branches in the forested part of Pinecone Park. I sawed them into short pieces for burning next Winter.

When my back tired of that work, I put the plants I got when I was in Nanaimo into their new homes. Then it was back to sawing and stacking. The work I’m doing with the branches is making it far, far easier for Joe to break down the huge, chucked sections of fallen trees when he comes later in the season to chop the bucked sections of fallen trees. In the afternoon, while Ron walked Sheba, I visited Andrew and Dave who were installing the metal roof panels. 

I kept at it, doing chores all afternoon, had dinner, watched some TV and started longing for bed at 7:30, but I managed to stay up until 9:30 and then I fell into my lovely cosy and inviting bed with Sheba and fell instantly to sleep.

Today will resemble yesterday. It’s a beauty of a day, and I’ll have to water all the garden beds in the backyard. It has begun, the tedious watering season. 

It's a shame that the new metal roof looks so dull in this photo. Last night I
practically went blind from the brightness of the light reflecting of the bright
silver finish of Ursula and David's new roof.

Pinecone Park Lodge and my trust old van. I took this yesterday as I arrived
back from visiting Dave and Andrew next door.

This is the wood from the cut up branches. I've much more to do today 

The beautiful pink and orange light this morning.

And speaking of beautiful, here is Her Highness, my big love.

Donuts!

The wood is on the roof.

Andrew.

Pre-Summer began yesterday. Stating today, we will enjoy a lovely long stretch of brilliant and warm weather. Yahoo. I’m looking forward to working outside and visiting Dave and Andrew to watch their progress on the yurt.

Her Highness and I left for the 7:35 ferry. I was excited about seeing the ophthalmologist and hearing from her what’s going on with my eye. I kept thinking that there was definitely something wrong, but the question was whether or not it could be fixed. Part of the problem is floaters and I doubt they can do anything about them. I Googled “fixing floaters,” and it says that they can be fixed with lasers.

But what a gorgeous day for a trip to Nanaimo! I had a free pass for the ferry because of the medical appointment, so I went to Canadian Tire afterwards to check out their watering systems and plants. I also went to Walmart for pet supplies, and then we headed back to Pinecone Park.

Kathy, the ophthalmologist, brought great relief when she said that she saw what was wrong. She told me that I have the kind of retinal detachment that happens after 1% of cataract operations. She said that it would slowly heal and that it may take up to 6 months for my vision to be clear. The good news is no intervention is required. I see her again in a month.

When I left her, I got into the car and drove to Thrifty Foods and bought myself a six-pack of mini-donuts. Fuck it, I thought, sometimes you need donuts to celebrate. My symptoms flare when anything goes wrong. My condition makes me crave stasis. I need to be calm and in quiet; I need to feel at peace. I don’t feel at peace when anything breaks down, when a pattern is interrupted, when the stasis becomes chaos. It’s endurable, but when correction comes to the thing that is wrong, my spirit soars. I feel wonderful in a calm way.

Now that I know what happened to my eye, and because I am in care, being monitored by Kathy, all is calm, all is bright. And it’s even better on a day when it is sparkling bright, and I can stop for plants on the way home. 

Today is going to be 20°, and for the next three days it’s going to remain sunny, and the temperatures are going to rise. I’ll be gardening every day, depending on how the back feels. I’ve written again to beautiful, wonderful, frustrating Bronwyn, the gardener, hoping that this time she’ll reply, and I’ll get some help with the garden because I have a lot of wood sawing or chopping and stacking to do—slowly.

I cannot wait to get out there today, and it’s all because of this new capacity to see beauty in my gardens. Rather, it’s because the plants have matured and spread, and the gardens look like gardens and not gardens in development. This year, I’ll attending to the few remaining holes in the cover. 

I’ve had this sudden emotional shift from only seeing needs to seeing beauty before. When I did a series of drawings. They were large and they were in pencil crayon. First, I’d draw the basic shapes in a very light blue on the paper. And then I’d tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak the drawing until it was to my liking. Then I’d lay on light base colours in the various parts of the drawing, and I’d keep adding colour through a very, very long and laborious process, and it looked like shit to me during most of that time.

The bigger the brush, the quicker the painting is finished. A pencil point, and even a beveled point, is a minute surface with which to create portraits. Drawing clothing and drapery is particularly challenging, and the work in my mini-exhibition was drawings of portions of the Sistine Chapel. It took for fucking ever to get the pieces done. Each one was 16” by 30”.

But with each one, I’d come to it one day and see something beautiful coming together, and pride in it gave me a second wind to re-commit to it with vigor and make it even better—perfect, in fact, in my estimation. I just got my second wind for gardening.

…

I cut up my drawings to decorate the cupboard doors in my kitchen when I lived in the artist-live-in studio on the wonderful East Side of Vancouver. And when I put that place on the market, my realtor strongly suggested that I replace the cupboard doors. What? You don’t like my drawings?

I put the doors where I put a lot of things when I lived in the studio, in the lane across the street. Everything I put there, quickly disappeared. I was taking more things out shortly having put the doors there, and a man on a bicycle was looking at my doors. He asked me if I had put the doors there. Then he asked me if I did the drawings. Then he double-checked with me that they were for the taking. And when I said yes to that, he lay his bike down, walked over to me, and he hugged me and said thank you, thank you.

So, fuck you realtor.

Walkabout Photos

Those video links I posted the other day, to Jacob Lusk and Billy Porter, they thrill me. I’ve been watching them every day since, and when I watched them yesterday, I had a wonderful feeling. I don’t think I’ve ever felt better about being a gay man in my life. Those two wonderfully talented and proudly out gay men, make me feel incredibly proud to be a survivor of shame and guilt and AIDS, and very, very proud to be part of our community.

Her Highness and I walked with our small pack before I went into the village to do some shopping, and then I came home to enjoy another slow day. It was cloudy and uninviting outside, so I did only a little yard work before retreating to the warmth and comfort of the house.

I enjoyed watching Dave and Andrew putting the ring on the top of the roof where there will be a glass dome that can be opened in the Summertime. It will open with a switch and bring in lots of light. Once the ring is done, tar paper will go down on the plywood roof and then shiny metal panels (silver coloured) will complete the exterior of the roof.

•

There’s been a recurring mention of my “dull” life on this blog. (Please notice that I never say, “dull and boring.” I am incapable of being bored.) And when I posted this past Monday morning, that empty little post, I wondered, “Should I end this blog?”

The question has arisen many times, but I always plod on. I was always talking about things I was doing, be it travelling, creative projects, friends, or work. I have my old diaries. I’d buy large blank hard-backed drawing books, and I’d write and paste various things in them. It was probably 70% souvenirs and drawings, and 30% writing.

This blog only became a daily chronicle when I started seeing Dr. Shoja, 8 years ago. And sometimes there is nothing to say because, yes, I lead a very dull life. I must. I rarely leave neither my home, nor my island. Thank God for pets, gardening and books!

Then I opened my email, and there was a message from my friend, Cathy, that included this sentence: “You may think your life is dull, but be corrected.” This was the last sentence of a paragraph about why she likes reading my blog. No wonder people believe in God; coincidence in life can be a miracle. Bless your beautiful soul, Cathy. Yesterday, you had the voice of a loving God. 

•

I avoid politics, but I happened on this remarkable text by Gareth Fearn in the London Review of Books about the student protests on US campuses:

“This is a toxic combination: universities reliant on investment portfolios in a system where mega-profits are made by companies that threaten and destroy human life, influenced by an increasingly radicalised class of billionaires, teaching students whose degrees won’t earn them enough to pay off their loans, managed by supine administrators threatened by (or willingly collaborating with) a reactionary right, who have decided that young people’s minds are being turned against capitalism not by their own lived experience of austerity and racialised police violence but by ‘woke Marxist professors’. This situation has now met with a live-streamed genocide which is supported, and brazenly lied about, by political leaders and commentators who claim to stand for truth and justice. Students, like much of the public, cannot square the reality of what they see with the world as constructed by politicians and the media.

“Under such circumstances, pitching tents, raising placards and demanding divestment are really quite mild-mannered responses. That they have been met, in many US universities, with militarised policing reflects the fragility of liberalism — in the face of the growing hegemony of the conservative right as well as its own inability to offer a future even to Ivy League college students, let alone the less privileged.”

Whoa, that is one masterpiece of insight and language.

•

I'm off to see the ophthalmologist today. Last night, in sunlight at 6:30 pm, I did my evening walkabouts in my cage called Pinecone Park, and I took these pictures. Come with me on my walkabout.

This is the new bed, surrounded with stones from Eoin and François.
The ferns were here when I came.

There will be colour with bushy beautiful Ferns framing the
entrance to my backyard called Pinecone Park.

The Creeping Thyme helps make the garden look
mature. Time is the most beautiful part of a garden.

This garden was planted a year ago, after some of the deck 
steps were removed. You can barely see the dirt. That's what
I want everywhere.

This garden was a challenge. It's now 5 years old, but it's built
on tree roots that absorb all the water, and this garden gets 
very little direct sunlight, and what comes is late in the day.

This is my natural backyard. Look at all the daisies! I think
it's beautiful. The lawn failed, but where once there was once 
weeds, natural shrubs and plenty of prickly blackberry vines,
all mixed with years of needs, branches and CONES!

See all those blue-grey plants poking up between the Japanese
Maple and the log? Those are Campions, and they are native
plants with to-die-for brilliant pink/violet flowers. I love mixing
florals with native plants.

This garden has been a bitch. It's twin (next photos), is called
Valley of Death. They are between trees There are two, above,
on either side of the phone. My gardens compete for water and
nutrients with the trees. I need very hardy plants here. This garden
bakes in the late morning and noontime sun in Summer.

The Valley of Death is coming along slowly. I'm considering 
getting soaker hoses for these two challenging gardens. Water
is precious here, and I have weak water pressure.

This photo gives me goosebumps because it's so pretty. 

The Fern Garden is looking good, but it needs more work and
my gardener is MIA. But, what's that in the very back left corner?

Answer: This tree. It's a Chestnut, and I got a two-inch tall 
seedling from Anna who found it in her garden. This part of
the garden gets almost no sunlight.

This is a new garden around the base of a tree. More of E&F's 
rocks create the garden, framed by native plants: Oregon Grape
on the left, and Salal on the right.

This was once a lovely lush clump of Salal. This was a totally
native garden that I liked having as part of the park.

This is beautiful moss that I grow, split and 
transplant. Eventually, it will surround my very
long walkway. I water it every day in Summer.

The trellis is really covered now, with Climbing
Hydrangea and a climbing Rose. When the roses 
bloom on top, it's a glorious sight.