summertime

peace

this time last week, i was madly prepping potatoes and salads, sweeping up the garden, setting up garden furniture and trying (mostly successfully) not to panic. everyone arrived, and we had a lovely day. n's family are a charming and entertaining bunch, and this was the first time they had all seen each other in one place for 35 years.

n's sister and family left yesterday for france, and suddenly the house is quiet again.

and, in all of this chaos, i also had a job interview in london and got the job! i start tomorrow. it's for one of the london councils, so public sector, and it looks pretty straight-forward - managing the moves for several large projects. it's just down the road from my university which will make my life easier come autumn. the people seem very friendly, and i think i'll enjoy working in a less corporate environment. y'know, instead of working my arse off every day for corporations i actively oppose within a system i am ambivalent about at best.

so all change again. it certainly keeps life interesting :)

the onslaught

we are being inundated with family this weekend, and i can't tell you how delighted i am about it! n's sister, brother-in-law and niece arrive from canada tomorrow, and then on sunday almost all of n's british family will be joining us for a bbq. please, please don't let it rain. they won't all fit in the house. because i'm not working at the moment, i've had time to plot and plan and it has been fun, and probably a good distraction. i love planning parties. i love planning anything, truth be told.

the house has not looked this good (aka clean) since my parents visited in december. it scrubs up well, actually. and n and i are absolutely knackered. we are doingthat thing where you yawn and look at the clock and ask each other if it is too early to go to bed (8:27 - he says yes, i say no).

sweet dreams

a difficult decision

for the past 2 1/2 years, on and off, i've been a volunteer on a rape crisis helpline. on and off, because when projects got too crazy at work, and i had classes and papers too, i couldn't do the line as well. when i first started, i knew i wanted to do something, but i was really scared by the idea of answering calls on the helpline. the training was excellent, though, and i got over my fear, and for the most part i enjoyed volunteering. lots of our callers ring regularly, and you get to know them. sometimes i knew i was able to give information that people needed, and that felt right. and i believe women (this line is women-only - staff, counselors, volunteers are all women) need all the support they can get, especially in dealing with issues like sexual abuse and rape, where open dialogue is often not possible for a number of reasons.

a lot of our more recent volunteers are trained, or training as counselors themselves. hearing them on the line, it seems like they know just what to say. they are a different breed. i'm not all together sure i actually like them sometimes - there's a coldness somewhere i can't quite put my finger on. i never saw myself as a counselor type - in fact, when i found out that was what the helpline was, i thought, uh oh - not for me. maybe i was right.

for the last few months, i've been feeling increasingly uncomfortable on the line. i feel, at the core of it, that i can't offer anything. helpless. i have nothing in me to draw upon - and i can't pretend that i have any idea of anything - a futility of knowledge. a plaster (band-aid) on a sawed-off limb. one of the things that helped me overcome my fear at the beginning was knowing that we were not trained counselors, we were volunteers, and our job was to listen. this now feels really inadequate. i feel like i may have come to the end of my psychic availability, if that makes any sense.

i explained this to my friend j, who is a psychologist. she said people burn out, and that 2 1/2 years is a long time. she's subtle, isn't she?!

so i decided to quit, and that tonight would be my last time. and i felt relieved, which i took as a sign that it was the right thing to do. but then tonight, on the line, i just felt really guilty. all the empty spaces in the "july" rota, the nights that the line hasn't been open because a volunteer couldn't make it, or we just didn't have enough volunteers to fill the rota. am i being selfish? is an incompetent volunteer better than no volunteer at all?

i thought maybe i could offer to do something else - like write a monthly newsletter for all of the volunteers so we/they would feel more connected and up to date on issues, law, etc.

i really don't want to do it anymore. and i feel really bad and really guilty about not wanting to do it anymore.

gates and fences

before:



after:



two and a half years ago, when humphrey, our greyhound, came to live with us, we put up a temporary barrier to keep him out of our neighbour's garden. it was an amalgamation of an old trellis, several reclaimed fence posts, and an industrial amount of gardening wire. it was not pretty, but it did the trick, kept humph from eating the neighbour's three (3!!!) cats, and anyways we were going to put a proper gate there soon.

in one and a half weeks we are hosting a gathering of n's family, both canadian and british. this has put the fire under us, so to speak, and we are getting things done

oh yes

and we built it ourselves

what do you do with 20 kilos of cherries?

you make wine, of course!! what a silly question!

we were planning on making a large batch of cherry wine this year, as cherry wine is one of our favourites, and last year's gallon seemed to evaporate in a most unseemly manner. so imagine our delight, when we found small flats of cherries on sale in our local farm shop! spanish cherries, which is not ideal, but this is wine, not eating, and at this price, spanish will be just fine. in a few days/weeks the british cherries will be out and we will feast on those.

when you have 20 kilos of cherries in your kitchen, your options for what to do with the afternoon become startlingly limited. it took about three hours to de-stem, squeeze, bag and prepare these beauties for their first ferment. in radio four talk, that was all the way from the afternoon play till after the six o'clock news. phew.

this should make about 25 litres of wine, about 30 - 35 bottles. they'll be ready for the new year and will be a welcome reminder of summer in the dark days of january.

you'll be happy to know

that i've snapped out of sanctimonious self-pitying bullshit mode and have reverted back to my general oh well better get on with it mentality.

these days i am spending my mornings doing job-hunting sort of stuff - emailing long lost colleagues, agencies, trawling through job sites - it's fun, oh yes. that is once i get up - which i have this sort of delusion that i do at 8 am to join n and the dawg for the morning walk. what actually happens is n comes back into our bedroom (he has been up for HOURS at this point) and i sometimes don't wake up at all, or if i do, i mumble, what, 8 o'clock already? and roll over and snooze for another hour, because i can. 11 hours of sleep a night, people. it's a beautiful thing. i haven't slept this much since i was a teenager and i love it.

afternoons are spent foraging (elderflowers at this time of year, soon gooseberries and cherries), running errands, trying out new recipes, like this artisan bread in 5 min a day thing which is cool, or will be once i figure out the right moisture balance so i can make loaves instead of discs.

tonight i taught n how to play dutch blitz, on a pack i rescued, forlorn, from my parents' box of board/card games last time i was in canada. ironically, for a game that i am guessing was designed to keep good mennonites (or whatever) away from evil cards, it will make a great pub game. i'd love to say i trounced him, but he is a quick bastard and picks up on games remarkably quickly.

it's all good, or good enough, anyways.

well hello

i've begun the inevitable. i've begun looking for paid employment. i've been putting this off, but my inner task master (damn you! DAMN YOU!!!) has demanded action and i have thus coughed up. i have been enjoying my holiday - i have been enjoying my holiday so much that enjoying sounds like some sort of euphemism. i have been reveling, lolling, nay, luxuriating in my holiday.

i was going to write about the horror of hearing my voice slip back into work mode, and the tenseness that came with it, and the feeling of education that comes from finally working out a bit how the whole networking thing works so i'm working names properly (i hope) for a change, but -

ugh

we have to do these things. and believe me, i know i'm lucky to have these things to do. i do know that. it's not just hard work. i was lucky to be born into a family where a work ethic was taught and expected, and where i saw everyone around me work, and work hard, and teach me how to work hard. and my friends and family who support me and are proud of me and cheer me on. i know, and i'm grateful. and i don't mind working hard.

but

our corporate model is corrupt and dangerous, and benefits no one but those lucky enough to be at the top, and i do mean lucky. it's not right. it's not justified. and by participating i am complicit.

so i am proceeding with a heavy heart, like in so many things. is this age? maturity? the gradual weight of your heart until you are stooped and shuffling?

contentment

it's a bank holiday weekend here in the uk (not that this makes much difference to me, unemployed sloth that i am!). the town rugby club always has bands and a beer tent out in the recreation ground next to our house on this weekend. the last two years it has been wet and cold. this weekend has been beautiful, but the weather gods must be down on rugby as the afternoon has ended in thunder-showers of biblical proportions.

we checked out a bit of the music, but mostly were just enjoying hanging out, reading the accumulated papers that i didn't get around to over the weekend, and wallowing in the contentment of a fun weekend with lots of food and wine, old friends and new friends, bbq's and sunshine. i can't remember the last time i was this relaxed.

*happy sigh*

now you must excuse me, i have a packed agenda this evening of sipping wine, picking at the roast chicken carcass, and, if we can be bothered, starting season 5 of the wire.

btw, humphrey really did run through the screen door the day after we put it up. the mesh held, but he broke all three hinges off. we managed to repair it, and it is still hanging, but dog-destruction remains a problem. we have temporarily solved this by putting a small free-standing gate on whichever side of the door humphrey is, but this turned out to be such a pain on saturday's bbq that we ended up propping open the screen door; an open-door policy, if you will, for bugs. we hope that perhaps humph will learn with time but i fear it may be yet another instance of humphrey successfully training his humans.

screen door!!!!!!!

people - behold - in all its glory, the marvel of a screen door. now i know the canadians among you will be bemused, possibly befuddled by this, but back here in the old country this is cutting edge. spain and italy have screens, so it seems implausible that there is some european moratorium on the use of mesh screening in window and door applications, yet they consistently elude us in the uk. when we have previously enquired about the possibilities of their installation, we are considered mad, and quite possibly dangerous. (see poppy seeds, below. btw - i have since discovered that what the uk calls blue poppy seeds, canadians call black poppy seeds - they are in fact the same thing. thank you geo for clearing that one up.)

we have sighed, and added lack of screenage to our growing list of british eccentricities, joining their brethren of separate hot and cold taps with no mixer tap and the complete absence of plain cheerios (honey nut? check. 4 grain? check. plain? what are you - some kind of freak??? *sigh*)

but the buggies, they continued to fly into our house by their multitudes. fruit flies - arch enemy of the home brewer. something had to be done. i concluded that if i had to buy the damn door in italy and carry it back i would, so long as there was a screen door by summer. as i was hunting online for said door (i'm more of a carry-on girl myself), i found a site that sold screen door kits.

the kit arrived, and it was proper. way too proper for n and i to unleash our grubby mitts all over it. i left strict instructions for n and our friend j, who is diy-inclined, to make the door up while i was gallivanting in canada for several weeks. sadly, screen door construction paled in the light of an empty house, a full bottle of whiskey, and axies and allies. i can't complain, i would have done the same thing.

so today, n and i, inept as we are at anything requiring manual dexterity, tools, measuring, etc etc etc - we girded our loins, we read and re-read, we measured and re-measured (and re-re-measured) and we tackled the kit.

and it went quite well actually.

now for the windows...