One Part Inspiration...

One of the new developments for us here at The Pokeaway is a bit more financial freedom to develop The Pokeaway.  Remember my kitchen? I'm dreaming of a white kitchen...  Well, now, there is a possibility that we might be able to get the cupboards put in and all my earthly troubles will be over.  We have been entertaining offers of cupboard construction and several companies have shown up to poke and prod.  It feels a little like they are the kitchen doctors and we are the patients.  They say a lot of " mm hmmms " and " I sees " and " ahas " and " hnunhs " , while I try to read their mind$$$$.  They consult their stethoscope (measuring tapes), and tap on the walls to test reflexes, and use large sweeping motions with their hands to prescribe recommendations for a thriving, well-conditioned, flourishing kitchen.  " Why don't you bring the fridge over there?"   " If you moved the plumbing to this wall you'd have...

April 22 is my Mom's birthday and it always makes me feel homesick. I want to pick up the phone and call. I want to drop by with a bouquet of flowers. None of these have been an earthly possiblity for 13 years. Instead I try to honour her memory by reminiscing:  Mom was the oldest of ten children.  Their family lived close to the Dionne quintuplets, who were the first quints known to survive their infancy.  They had the same Dr. (Dafoe). Mom had jet black hair. As far as I know, she never coloured it.  My memories are only of a salt and pepper look - which gave way to the most beautiful silver gray. Mom was a very practical woman  - this aspect of her personality filtered down in all sorts of ways.  She would save envelopes and write notes on the back of them.  She always used up her leftovers.  She had a routine for housework and followed it.  Mom was a woman of great propriety.  She in...

We have been in the throes of more upheaval at The Pokeaway.  Since my Dad and brother came to visit, we have had all the baseboards in the upstairs installed and painted.  All the doors are painted and the cubby holes now have entrance doors.  The bathroom was repainted (in case you don't remember you can look  here  to have a reminder of why) and while we were at it, we move the corner desk out and this one in.  I quite like it.  Mostly because now I will have a filing cabinet at my fingertips instead of the makeshift system I have been using for three years.  YAY! Another thing I am proud of it that I hooked up the computer myself. My husband has been extraordinarily busy and hasn't had a time frame where he could crawl under the desk and hook up the cords from the printer or the monitor, or the sound system.  So I asked myself, and I said yes.  I followed the colour patterns on the cords and matched them to the ones on the hard...

When the kids were small(er), I usually declined going to extraciricular professional enrichment activiites - partly because it of the expense, and partly because their schedules were more important to keep than my own opportunities. Now that they are older, I am more free to take advantage of what is offered. So a few weeks ago, I made my way across the bridge to the big city to a ukelele workshop. In case you are wondering how I got such clear pictures of the bridge work in progress, I should say that a three minute trip across the deck took me 45 minutes that day - due to an accident at the north end.  There was nothing I could have done except for enjoy the view and take a couple of pictures to show for it.  The workshop itself was a pile of fun.  There were about 25 of us in the room.  All of us knew something about music.  So in the space of a few minutes we learned enough chords to play "Amazing Grace" ,  "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" ...

My mother-in-law always makes sure that the major holidays of the year are celebrated in style.  This usually involves a family get-together with lots of food and memory-making activities.  At Christmas, it is puzzles.  At Valentine's it is chocolate.        At Easter, it is an Easter Egg hunt.          Can I just say that my family is very competitive. Exhibit A  If you need evidence, just look at Exhibit A. Every Easter the hunt involves the eldest males of the family going out to hide the eggs, while the children wait inside with curtains drawn and strict instructions not to peek.  I don't think this has ever stopped them from trying to be the first to see where the eggs are being hid.  After the hiding, the children are gathered in one spot and no one is allowed to go until Nana says so.  And because there is such a discrepancy in age, the litt...

A walk out to sea with my husband and big brother By the time I have any memories of my growing up family, my oldest brother had left home.  I still felt his presence because we always talked about him and my oldest sister who had also left home.  We wrote them lots of letters.  And we would wait for any news from them via airmail.  We lived a half a world away but I still had a sense of pride and immense admiration for both of them.  Their lives seemed to be more exotic than my own - mostly because we only heard from them in letter form - there were no phone calls across the world at that time.  When we'd get mail, we read the letters over and over again, so as to gain some small nugget of connectedness with this part of our family who lived so far away. When I was eight, we returned to Canada.  Our family experienced a series of unfortunate events, which unfolded in quick succession.  During that time, my oldest brother was...

I was feeling a little panicky a few weeks ago.  My brother and Dad were coming to visit.  It would be the first time my Dad had seen The Pokeaway since he was out to visit a couple of years back.  At that time, there were no walls inside the house, and the siding was just going on.  Even though there had been a lot of changes, there were certain things I wanted cleaned up before he got here.  One of them was the paint job in my son's room.  We had left it unfinished for several months.  Every time I thought about getting out the brushes and rollers, a great fatigue overtook me.  I have painted SO much in the  house and a re-do was more than I could manage.  The other big job was the repainting of the bathroom.  I had used a paint which was sub-par and even though I tried to fix the job (five times) it never righted itself and again, I defaulted to leaving it be.  There were even parts of the bathroom that hadn't even been pa...