For the newcomers to my blog, (Welcome!) Coco the Community cat adopted us after Widdercat died a few year ago. Actually Coco wanted to adopt us the minute we moved in but Widdercat would have none of it. Two fluffy Grande Dames going at it hammer-and-tongs, fur a-flying, all hissy and spitty, is a sight to behold, but not to be repeated, so Coco was hugged and cuddled when we went for walks, but studiously ignored when we were at home.
After Widdercat , we decided our lives were too transient (and dealing with the home owners association politics as lowly renters too futile) to give another cat a forever home. (we intend to have gazillions of them when we next move to our forever home. It’s been Mrs Widds and my experience that our cat companions have always found us at the right time)
In the absence of fur-fights Coco decided that, as absurd as our decision was, she would respect it and invited herself into our lives for cuddles, pats, and ‘now let me out’ visits.
We’re not the only cat-orphans she’s adopted. The four houses at our end of the driveway are all blessed by her Most High Fluffyness.
So, my finest Winter, to date, (3 months of snow on the ground) is now done and we are back to our usual Spring, Autumn, and Winter, rainforest-y climate – rain.
It seems my ‘chitis likes it here on Widder Island. I’m on my third week of antibiotics and I feel crappy, and if La La Land wins Best Picture, I’ll feel even worse. It wasn’t … terrible … but come on people, if you’re going to have a film about people who sing and dance, hire actors who can sing and dance above a B-movie level.
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We return you to our regularly scheduled snow report.
Going …
How the mighty have melted
Going …
Poor rosemary looks like a bunch of frozen twigs
Midnight at the Oasis …
Midnight last night … Yep … that’d be more snow! ( shot from the front door, cos there’s no way I’m going out there)
We’ve had snow on the ground since early December. It looked something like this …
Our street in the middle of January
But then along came our usual rainy weather and it all started to melt …
I’m melting
(Looks like Rosemary survived fairly unscathed)
I felt like Winter was disappearing before my very eyes
I’m melting … I’m melting
But then … at 8am this morning …
I’m melt … whoopsie!!!
SNOW!!!!
Snow-mores!!!!
In other related news, I have a chitis in my broncs (bronchitis) and I can’t go out and play. There’s nothing sadder than a grownup who loves snow as much as I do …
Recently I’ve had an influx of new readers and followers on this blog, which is really nice, so I thought a bit of a catch-up/about me post was in order … but first, the weather …
The snow’s all melted except for the sad remnants of the little boy wizard-in-training’s snow fort. (he, of the wondrous wellies from my previous post) The bluejays and robins, and some sort of bird that looks like a cross between a starling and a robin, are still enjoying their baths, except that now they have to be content with puddles, and potholes that appeared in the middle of the road after the snow transmogrified into water.
It’s been raining for nine straight days now. This morning I found myself checking for signs of gill-ness around my neck and ribs, and web-ness between fingers and toes.
Such amounts of one particular sort of weather can sometimes bring on bouts of introspection. (much preferable to bouts of rain induced homicidal mania, or conversely, depression) Satisfied I had not sprouted gills or webbing, I sat at my desk, with cuppa, and stared over the top of my monitor at the garden and frolicking avians, not really seeing either. And reviewed the complex and statistically improbable stepping stones that brought me to this place and this time.
I was born in England, but before I turned two my parents decided to seek their fortune in the colonies. They had three choices, Australia, Canada, or New Zealand. Why they chose Australia I’ll never know. Perhaps it was so spectacularly different from Canada and New Zealand. However, to Australia we went. I wonder how I’d’ve turned out if we’d stayed in England. (or moved to NZ or Canada … another one of those irony things is I’m in Canada anyway)
The next big splitting of the pentiments (hehe, see what I did there?) was having to leave school at fourteen. Working at all sorts of low-skilled labouring jobs. I could’ve stayed doing that, perhaps working my way up from a factory floor into a managerial position. What stories would I have been able to tell of that life, I wonder? But no, I had a yearn to learn, and a short attention span. Everything I tried added to my list of things I didn’t want to do or be.
I thought I might want to be a world class athlete, but motorbike-meets-semi-trailer took care of that ambition.
I thought I might want to be an architect, and talked my way into university as a mature age student. (High school dropout goes to university. I still chuckle at that) I was good at it too. Architecture, not university. Turns out I’m too much of an iconoclast to play the academic game.
In the end architecture clashed with the spiritual path I’d taken to like a duck to water. I was studying architecture and Shamanism at the same time, but ultimately, ‘there could be only one.’##
Now we come to a fun bit of this little wander down my memory lane. Finding romance on the interwebz. Let me tell you, there were a thousand ways that could’ve gone wrong, but it didn’t. OK, there were a couple of hiccups, but nothing that didn’t expand my horizons a little. (Moving from one side of the Pacific Ocean to the other qualifies as the ultimate expanded horizon, I think)
Throughout all my adventures, a thread ran through everything I did, became and evolved into. Writing.
If you’ve read my ‘About Me’page you’ll know about my first foray into storytelling. Nothing much happened after that until my motorcycle accident, where I spent the first year of recovery alternately being tortured by a wonderful physiotherapist and writing the first draft for what ultimately turned out to be (probably) book 3 of the ‘Gallery’ series (of which, book 1 is ‘Mortal Instinct’) … and what a journey that was …
So, it seems that I was always destined to be a writer, it just took me a while to get here!
P.S. the rain stopped, as it is wont to do, and then the sun came out, finally!
Did you know that robins and bluejays like playing in the snow? Even when it’s turning into a giant slushy because of two days of rain on the heels of three days of snow. So does the little boy from the house across the way all decked out in bright yellow wellies with blue stars on them. (I’m certain he’ll grow up to be a wizard)
Today however, I can’t go out and play with any of them. My knees are acting up and the best I can do is gaze winsomely out my window. (where I took the pic from) You can’t see the birds because I think they’re bathing in the car tire canyons created by this morning’s exodus, and the boy scooted out of sight before I got the shot, but they’re all still out there, playing in the slush. Who in their right mind, even a robin or a bluejay, bathes in icewater, even for fun?
There are bluejays and robins here somewhere
Days like today seem to belong to other realms or reality. Another house across the way has a plume of white smoke issuing from its chimney. The smoke gets caught up by a bit of a breeze that mixes it seamlessly with the dense mist that’s rolling in from the lake.
While I appreciate all this wintery imagery in spite of my banged up knees that keep me snug inside my little Widderhouse, my writerly tasks are nudging my elbow. Perhaps they’ve conspired with my knees to keep me here at my desk. So, back to it I go .. right after this …
It was great to see ‘Gravity’ collect so many Academy Awards last night. I am slightly peeved that Sandra Bullock didn’t win, but I haven’t seen any of the movies that the other nominees were in so it has to remain a little slightly irrational peeve.
This video proves yet again that life and art are eternally intertwined.
