Tag Archives: Widdershins

Thin Ground

Blog posts are a bit thin on the ground here at Widder Island at the moment.

But I have a great reason for it …

…apart from all our conniptions and Wunder-Luster-ish plans … (currently standing at Plan Q – alphabetically speaking)

… and having a run of glorious sunny days where neither of us want to do a damn thing but wallow in it. It’s the kind of Spring sun that sits around 22-25 °C but the earth hasn’t warmed up (or dried out) yet to make it uncomfortably hot …

New leaves on the Winter Tree, and look at that glorious blue sky!

New leaves on the Winter Tree, and look at that glorious blue sky!

… and me badly spraining my ankle (it’s only now, three weeks later, stopped hurting every time I put any weight on it) the day we brought our trailer back from storage. (someone parking on the grass verge, and with never-ending months of rain turning everything underneath the grass to mud, left a bloody great trench for me to step into as I was guiding Mrs Widds as she backed the trailer into it’s spot) …

… I have been writing … lots.

105,000-ish words to be exact-ish, of a new novel. I started it in January and have been going gang-busters ever since.

Last night I finished the grand almost-at-the-end climactic scene, (I was sweating blood, I can tell you! All that choreography to get right, along with everything else, but very proud of it I am!) and only have a chapter or two of ‘aftermath-y’ tidying up left to do.

This is just the first draft, though. Once those last chapters are writ, it’s editing time … which I must confess, I enjoy, just about as much as I do writing first drafts. I’m a bit odd like that.

My goal was to write 2000 words on all my writing days, and by now I can whip them up in a couple of hours … the plan is to keep on writing thusly for the foreseeable future, now that I have a handle on it and it’s well and truly a habit by now, because of course there’s going to be a sequel.

-oOo-

In other Wunder-Lusters-y news …

We replaced out flat tonneau cover on the tray of our truck with a soft-top canopy. Sooooo much more room to load up with boxes and assorted householdery to take to the storage unit.

Yep, that’s me reflected in the front window, or at least my shoulder. Not sure what was happening with my head, probably a ‘reflection’ of how my brain feels sometimes with all that writing

Yep, that’s me reflected in the front window, or at least my shoulder. Not sure what was happening with my head, probably a ‘reflection’ of how my brain feels sometimes with all that writing

It’s not just for transporting boxes. This is another step in our plan to go adventuring. The additional storage will hold our generator, spare cans of gasoline, propane bottle, emergency survival gear, etc, some of which with the flat tonneau cover, we would’ve had to store in the trailer itself as we traveled – not a good look.

Shiny new bones

Shiny new bones

It didn’t take us that long to assemble …

And this is how she looks all buttoned up ... another step closer to the Dream

And this is how she looks all buttoned up … another step closer to the Dream

Big shout-out to Softopper in Boulder, Colorado, USA … for not only crafting a thing of beauty, but getting it to us when they promised!!!

-oOo-

NEWSFLASH!

Monday night … our Premier just announced that all non-essential travel outside of our health region will soon be restricted. (banned, in other words) They’re working on the guidelines as we speak, but it’ll be quite a few months before the regions open up again.

Not that we hadn’t discussed this possibility, and were preparing for it, in our understated yet stylish way, 🙂 and we’ll be able to get away for a bit to the campground we stayed in last year, just up the road, but realistically, any long-term, and long-distance, travelling is off the table for this year. Never say ‘never’, of course, because Herself, (or the Universe, or what/whomsoever) has the final say in such things.

But, that, as they say, is that.

Deconstruction

The Covid-19 infection rate in our Province is rising alarmingly. Essential travel only is recommended – to be reviewed at the end of the month (April) by the Provincial health authorities.

If we wish to stay with our current departure date (31st May) we will have to give notice to our landlady at the end of this month.

We’re only a third of the way through the month, but given that there’s usually a 2-3 week lag between infection rates and the numbers being released, the 31st of May isn’t looking good.

We can reschedule our campground booking without losing our deposit, if we give them enough advance warning.

So, all-in-all, blergh, humbug, and other assorted grumbling noises.

On the up side, we’ll have more time to get on with our packing and sorting, storing and deconstructing of various elements of our house. Case in point – shelving units …

This used to be a very organised workspace

This used to be a very organised workspace

Second case of points – our storage unit is slowly filling …

A box here, a garbage bag there ... it all adds up

A box here, a garbage bag there … it all adds up

Funny thing is though, having all this time to do the sorting, packing, etc, is wonderful, but the process feels like it’s going on forever. I’ve never experienced moving like this.

In my younger days in OZ (Australia) I could be packed up and out of a house in a week, which in some of those early digs was about all the notice I got. Ah yes, those rousing days of shared housing and inner-city living.

Even when I could afford to live by myself, and/or with partners, house-moving took a month at the longest. Hell, even when Mrs Widds and I moved her to Widder Island, we were out of our old place in Vancouver in a month. (nearly bloody killed us, but we did it)

This more sedate pace feels right though. We have time enough to look at each and every object and go, ‘storage’, ‘in the trailer’, or ‘thrift store/garbage’. Those are our only three options for every thing here.

It does clarify one’s decision-making processes.

-oOo-

Here’s something I uncovered the other day. A rough template I created in another Era, (somewhere around the end-ish of 2019) look familiar?

Same women, same wheels, same three coasts ... hell yeah!

Same women, same wheels, same three coasts … hell yeah!

Maybe not yet, and maybe not as soon as we’d planned, nevertheless …

The Terrifying Art Of Becoming

Freek Week downgraded itself to mere Freek Hours, thence to Freek Minutes. These minutes are, however, just as overwhelming as the hours and weeks. The only good thing about them is that it takes less time to overcome them but their ability to come seemingly out of nowhere, is disconcerting, to say the least.

Today’s Freek Minute comes to us directly from the Storage Locker …

Empty ... un-full-filled

Empty … un-full-filled

I know what I have become living here on our island in the middle of a lake. I have become a cancer survivor, a self-published author, (Prelude – which I am inordinately proud of) … I have become too overweight, too sedentary … I have become older, by eight years, and wiser, I hope … a survivor of 2020 … I am closer to my physical death than my birth, and I am far too fond of my habits.

… but what will I become if I stay here? The answer to that lies in a deep level of self honesty … which says I will become invisible, even to myself, with the passing of days … I will eventually disappear into the illusion of safety and security, the comfort of familiarity and routines, and a spirit-death of a thousand fear-filled thoughts.

What will I become, though, when I leave?

-oOo-

We have a leave date, the 31st May, and we have started to fill our storage unit with ‘stuff’.

Other ‘stuff’ is bound for the thrift store. Boxes, half-filled with ‘stuff’ are littered throughout the house, and we wonder, every day, how we managed to not only accumulate so much ‘stuff’, but how we’ve lived with it for this long.

The answer to that last bit is, of course, we’ve been gathering ‘stuff’ for this very outcome.

Think about it for a minute. Think about where and how you’re living right now. I know that for most of you, your life is set. There are routines you follow. The future, although as yet unwritten, is fairly well defined.

I know my life was.

This adventure of ours feels very much like we’re throwing all that out the window.

Imagine leaving all your familiarities behind, taking with you only what you can carry. What goes with you? What stays?

Mrs Widds’ grandmother came west, through the Canadian prairies, in a covered wagon. Everything she knew, everything she owned, was within that wagon. The rest, was, perhaps a few lines drawn on an old map that led to the hope of a new life.

In my more sleep-deprived moments, because some nights sleep is hard to come by when lists loom so large, I feel as though that’s what we’re doing too.

-oOo-

So, what will I become?

We shall see.

Have You Ever …The Write Stuff of 2021

(continuing my occasional series of weird and wonderful things that never, seriously, never, happen to me)

… been struggling to write anything of significance for the entirety of 2020 and came up with bupkis, but just for laughs on the 8th of January 2021 you decide that, by-gosh-and-by-golly, you will write 3,000 words on a new story every writing day (not every day but the one’s designated as writing days) …

… and by the end of January you’ve settled into a steady rhythm of writing 2,000+ words every day, and not only are they words that form congruent sentences but they’re good words …

… and one night you have a particularly brilliant scene pop into your mind fully formed  …

… and by the time you’ve finished it’s three-o-clock in the morning and you still need to wind down so by the time you actually do get into bed it’s nigh-on 4am …

… and just as you’re falling asleep another scene pops into your mind, only this one’s not quite so well-formed so you decide you can get away with just making notes on the notepad that you take everywhere with you these days, without getting out of bed again and possibly disturbing your spouse who’s asleep in the next room and who’s not sleeping well at the moment anyway …

… and you reach across your bedside table to find a pen because the one you were using has run out of ink and you bump your lamp and send it crashing to the floor …

… and you get out of bed, pick up the lamp (it’s still working) and your pen, which has rolled under the bed …

… and get back into bed, get your writing tools reorganised, and knock over your bloody lamp again?

Nah. Me neither.

Freek Week!!!

Things are moving along a little faster than we expected.

Just before the pandemic closed down the world last year, Mrs Widds started working at a temp job that, luckily for us was in an essential industry.

Through a series of circumstances, that ‘temporary’ job extended and extended and extended, until we arrive here at the first couple of months of a new year.

At the beginning of February I did a wee Wunder-Lusters update, wherein we were planning to initiate the new and revised plan by the middle of this year-ish.

As the song goes, ‘t’aint necessarily so,’ folks.

Mrs Widds discovered today (Monday) that the company she’d worked for all through the pandemic pandemonium of 2020, was taking applications to fill the temp job she’d been working for the last year, with a permanent employee. Interviews for which got underway today, and Mrs Widds will be cleaning out her desk by the end of the week.

We were thinking that the job would wind down by May/June-ish anyway so we were ramping up our preparations with that timeframe in mind.

I understand the company’s position about the costs involved in hiring a temp versus paying an employee, but for fucks sake they could’a held off for another month or two.

So, money’s tight again, and the curve of our adventure has edged closer to vertical by about six weeks.

Are we freaking out right now?

Not at all. Why would you think that?

Not at all. Why would you think that?

In honour of our, hm, let’s call it , ‘enhanced’ timetable we have declared the rest of this week to be, FREEK WEEK … where all manner of squeaking, shrieking, weeping, freaking-out, procrastinating, denying, and assorted other coping mechanisms and stress release vocalisations are encouraged.

After that our motto is going to be, ‘It is what it is’, and we’ll get on with it.

I encourage you to take advantage of this burgeoning international movement and embrace your inner and outer FREEK WEEK, and then get on with it too.

The White Stuff

The view from our back door this afternoon.

SNOW!!!

SNOW!!!

A New Dawn, A New Day – The Wunderlusters: Plan B

When last we met our intrepid lesbians in the waning days of yesteryear, they planned to head out, in their trusty little travel trailer, into the wild blue yonder that is Canada.

Their motto,’ Two women, Eight Wheels, Coast to Coast to Coast’, would’ve taken them to such diverse places as Tyuktoyaktuk, which shakes hands with the rather chilly Arctic Ocean, Peggy’s Cove, nestled up against the mighty Atlantic Ocean, and catch a few waves off the shores of Ucluelet, brought in by the hemisphere-spanning Ocean that is the Pacific, just to name a few.

… … yeah … … about that … …

2020 – The Year That Changed The World!

We may yet get to visit all those places, but our priorities have changed … and who among us hasn’t had to rearrange a few things here and there over the last year?

Here’s the new plan.

We still do all of the above, but first, we get ourselves settled on a piece of land that’s not on a flood plain (here on Widder-island we’re barely above seal level as it is), or a major earthquake zone, or one of the battlefronts of the effects, social, environmental, economic, and political, that the climate crisis has wrought, and will continue to wrought (anyone know the present and future tense of ‘wrought’?) for decades to come. Decades that Mrs Widds and I, in our 70’s and 60’s respectively, hope to live long enough to survive.

What, I hear you ask, are a couple of middle-aged biddies going to realistically do to change their circumstances? Why don’t they just stay where they are? It’s comfortable, if a little small, all the services they need are nearby, and let’s face it they’re not getting any younger, and who knows if all the above mentioned crises will pan out as ‘worst-case scenario’s’ predict.

Yes, in the present moment, our lives are ‘secure’, but all we have to do is lift the veil and peer out from it’s comforting obscurity and see the world as it really is, and what it really will become in our lifetimes. (assuming, of course, we both make it happily and healthily into our 90’s and beyond)

That’s the thing with a slow moving crises, it’s really difficult to see any movement until the damn thing is breaking down your door.

There is hope in the world. Scientists are on the case, huge numbers of individuals, smaller numbers of corporations, governments, etc, are making changes to how they live their lives, conduct their business, make policy. I believe these efforts will be sufficient for the continuation of our species, but as to the quality of life for the greater percentage of eight billion-ish humans? That I think is where the dark might days lurk.

I have no wish to live out the remainder of my life in dark times if I can, in the immediate future, take steps to change that fate.

We have time, we don’t need to rush.

… back to the plan …

First, we’ve rented a storage space, sufficient to hold all our worldly goods. Then, after judicious sorting and taking of sorted stuffs to thrift stores, over the next couple of months, we’ll pack up everything into boxes and deposit them, (after carefully considering the order in which we will need to unpack) into storage.

In the meantime, we will set up all sorts of searches for land in our chosen area, that of the Kootenays, a mountainous region of the British Columbian Rockies, along the Columbia River, going both north and south.

In the meantime of that meantime, our trailer will be out of storage and I will be finishing off the last of the renovations so it will be livable for us both in the long term if necessary.

In the meantime of meantimes, our province has scheduled the covid-19 vaccinations for our age-groups in May-June-ish (all things being relatively equal-ish, and travel restrictions lifted) at which point all our meantimes should be aligned and we’ll be off.

We’re not foolish enough to believe that we won’t encounter any hiccups along the way, after all, this was our plan, with a few new tweaks, at this time last year, but without taking action all we’ll be doing is sitting here stewing in our own regrets … and I’ll be damned if I let that be my epitaph.

Science Plays Catch-Up

A headline in my daily Space.com news feed caught my attention today. It reads thusly, ‘The full moon may influence sleep and menstrual cycles, scientists say.’

OK, they’re not actually sleeping, but this is too good an image from Clip Art to pass up

OK, they’re not actually sleeping, but this is too good an image from Clip Art to pass up

Fancy that! Looks like what people have been saying about their sleep patterns and women have been saying about their menstrual cycles, for eons, can now be added to the roster of SCIENCE FACT

I could go about the irony of ‘science’ ignoring ‘folklore’ to the detriment of those same folk, until ‘science’ gets off it’s monolithical arse and admits it might’ve got it wrong, but those of you who know me know that I would never gloat like that! Suffice to say I had a good chortle.

(in all honesty it’s not all ‘science’ practitioners, and since a good many scientists have moved on from that delightfully Victorian/patriarchal-centric view of the world, ‘science’ has the process of reforming itself well in hand)

The interesting thing the article revealed, which in itself is another ‘duh’ moment, is that the effects of ‘moon-sleeping, and moon-menstruating’ (I just invented those terms) wane with the introduction of, and prolonged exposure to, artificial light.

I’m not knocking artificial light though. If it wasn’t for artificial light my writing binges would not go well, and I’d be one very cranky writer let me tell you!

This isn’t me being cranky about not being able to write, this is me being cranky about not being able to write and not having had my first cup of tea in the morning

This isn’t me being cranky about not being able to write, this is me being cranky about not being able to write and not having had my first cup of tea in the morning

Snow?

It’s cold enough to snow.

There’s enough moisture in the air to snow.

The forecast is for snow.

I look out my window and the Winter tree is covered in … raindrops.

This wee duckling is a lot happier about the rain than I am, but thanks Clip-art for the cute image 😊

This wee duckling is a lot happier about the rain than I am, but thanks Clip-art for the cute image 😊

I’m sure I have some pictures from the Snows-of-Winter’s-Past (2017, I think) around here somewhere to console myself with …

Ahh, that’s better

Ahh, that’s better

 

SNOW!!!

SNOW!!!

A Numbers Game

On Sunday the 8th March, 2020, I started a list of dates and numbers. The first number was 106,369. Every day thereafter I recorded another number, as well as the difference between the new number and the previous day’s number.

Almost an alternate universe ago

Almost an alternate universe ago

On the 1st of June 2020, the number was 6,274,136. An increase 101,688 from the previous day’s tally.

(I never recorded a third set of numbers. That would’ve broken me long before my meltdown at Winter solstice)

Even back in March the numbers were already out of control. The everyday public didn’t know that, but those of us who were following the science realised that something was amiss.

It wasn’t until Wednesday the 19th August 2020 that I managed to rein in my impulse to record a daily number. Thereafter I only noted them every week or so.

The last time was on Thursday 7th January 2021 – 87,753,382. By that time numbers were meaningless.

This is what eight months looks like – I might’ve skipped a day here and there but this is what I did, every day

This is what eight months looks like – I might’ve skipped a day here and there but this is what I did, every day

Like most humans who are alive on the planet in this Age, I was brought up to believe, (also reinforced by every societal structure around me) that taking action, any action, was tantamount to being in control. (humans aren’t very good at being without ‘control’, being power-less – we tend to make all sorts of ill-considered decisions)

I no longer wanted to use an action, my own personal version of the numbers game, to ease my psyche through a global catastrophe (another one – as if we didn’t have enough, even before the 8th March) that I was powerless to stop anyway.

What started out as a ritual, became a habit that, at the end, I came to resent. I didn’t want to look up the numbers. I didn’t want to remind myself of how our species abysmally mutated individualism had failed, yet again, to avert another fiasco of our own making. (honestly, I’ll be pleasantly surprised if we make it to the year 2050 without the cost being reckoned not in hundreds of millions, but billions, of lives)

The numbers are still out there, expanding almost exponentially, and I am in here, making sure, as best I can, that the very uncertain near future, doesn’t blindside me …

However, you know what they say about last words being famous. I suppose we shall see what tomorrow brings.

As for those three bits of paper with numbers all over them? I feel a Funeral Pyre coming on.