One Evening After Work

There are days when it's a challenge to come up with a snapshot to post with an entry here. Then there are days when I have too many, but want to post them before the weather and landscape have changed and my snaps are "old news."

heading south again

a glance back

and down the road i go

cattails where there used to be grass in the ditch

surprising how just a slightly different angle changes the light

through the grassy backyard driveway i glimpse at a distance the little herd that has spent the summer at our place

one of the oat fields waiting to be swathed

How do you like my tattoo?

Gave it to myself while wrestling a heavy pan of lasagne out of the oven last weekend.

Wearing my favourite shirt, which came from the new secondhand store in town.

It's another incredibly perfect fall day here, and it's almost noon as I go to post this, and well past time to throw on some clothing and get out for a walk. Wish you were here!

FollowCats

Alison lives a block from the office, and her cats — from one to three of the permanent residents, on any given workday — follow her to and from the Wadena News building.

Taken through rearview mirror; I'm leaving for the day and Alison turns to encourage Jackson and Viggi to keep up to her.

A Kind of Yellow

This thistle must have been touched by frost. Ya think?

We had the paper "put to bed" by four o'clock so have all had a chance to get out and enjoy this glorious summer day in fall.

Things are still blooming in my garden:

And in the sky, the typical V:

After a stop to see Everett for a few minutes after work, and a stop for groceries, I picked up a small chocolate milkshake for the road:

The view down mainstreet Wadena from the drive-thru window

Moth on Wildflower

A last sip of nectar before ... what's to come for this moth or butterfly?

Harvest Harvest Everywhere

It's happening!
These men and machinery are taking off the crop across from Godhes' driveway. I've stopped at the corner, about to turn right and go into town.

Not Blindsided, but Might as Well Be.

First day at the computer for eight hours with progressives. SuckAGE. Not fun.

My co-worker Lee says he loves his now, though when he got them he was ready to throw them away the initial month.

"It's a matter of getting used to them," he says, repeating what the optometrist and his employees have said. "Then you'll automatically find that little window that works, without even thinking about it."

Uff Da.

In other big news from Ms Kate:

Click to enlarge.  From The Standing People, by Kahlee Keane.

Gunnar and Melissa have a mullein plant growing next to their driveway in Calgary, self-cloned by the one in the neighbours' back yard.

I've been keeping an eye out for it growing wild around here, but had no luck so far. Gunnar will save me some seeds from theirs so I can get some planted.

Up the Hill

On each of my four days off, I walked. On the third, I crossed the road to have a look at the north quarter.

Walk

It can't be helped.  You want to walk down it.

South of my driveway.

It's funny what the camera does. It draws everything close, so that you don't see all the open spaces beside the road.

These bins are more than a mile away. Considerably more.

Grub

When you're having major surgery on your chest, methinks you're one-armed for a while after.
Thus I've been prepping freezable foodstuffs for Rick and Faye, who is the chief cook over at their place and the one having an operation.

They were over last week for a drink and I sent them home with meat loaves and tomato soup.

Scott made his delicious tomato soup, which I ran through the blender and ladled into plastic jars to freeze. Just thaw, add milk, and heat.

I made lasagna casseroles (one of Mom's recipes) on the weekend.

And yesterday I made packages of meatballs.

I've worked my way through all my favourite ground beef dishes. Oh no, I haven't! There's still spaghetti casserole, chili, and bean dish.

Next: chicken.

New Specs

Am I in trouble here?
These glasses are fine for everything but reading on the computer screen, so far. A girl needs more than a pinprick-sized area that isn't blurry, and shouldn't have to rubberneck all over the place, throwing her neck out of whack, to find the one tiny spot where letters are clear.

That will never do!

We'll see what happens when I tackle the book stack tonight. But then it's three straight days at the computer desk. Practically a trial by fire.

Noted

Sunny day, warmish with cool breeze.
Long telephone chat with Luanne.
Trip to town to pick up new glasses.
Weird things. Might be a bit tough getting used to the reading-on-computer part.
But I'll give it three weeks and keep my fingers crossed.

Took Everett's refundables to the depot and dropped off the resulting $8.45 to him at work.

Picked up a bagful of groceries.

Walked in the door to find this on the kitchen table:

My note on top, Scott's beneath. 

So ... he is requesting a hearty late supper ...  then what does "Not K" mean?
It is a mystery.
Also, did we both make a K the same way?

I see one of them is out on a swather in the oats, as Scott had hoped for today.

Last Summer Night

Quite often when I look up from the back step as Ducky does his business before bed, or stand out in the yard under the stars, the sight of the Big Dipper takes me back to the veranda of a little cabin in northern New Brunswick.

There, the constellations seemed even larger and closer than they do here. Were we further north? Or was it that the yard was more heavily treed and so the Dipper was framed somehow, making it the sky’s main event?

But it is so, here, too.

It was beautiful there, then, and it’s beautiful here, now.

And I can’t help going back, in my mind, to the girl I was, and telling her where I am 36 years later: still awed and comforted by nature, still seeking frequent solitude, still sharing the dazzling night sky with no one.

The Hug

I can feel great heaps of fond affection for people standing in front of me, and none when they are not.

Is that normal? I mean, common?

It's not that I dislike or don't care about them when they're not in my presence.
But sometimes I'm unaware of my fondness for others till I find myself going in for the hug.

Three-Mile Island of Peace

The road we live on is two miles long and runs south to north.

Our driveway is three-quarters of a mile north of the correction line, which lies east and west. 

There is a lot of bush and quite a few trees lining the mile of road along the Godhe land on the east side, and on the west there is bush set back behind a wide, open field. It’s a pleasant place to find myself at any time of day and I'm grateful for a quiet gravel road to walk on.

I've eaten a couple slices of toast and strapped a fanny pack to my waist, put a cap on my head to block the sun’s glare, pulled a down-filled vest over my shirt, and hooked the camera to a belt loop on my jeans. 

Looking north, from just south of our driveway

Old Jenna Doodle must've gone over to Godhes' yesterday and she hasn’t returned by morning, so it's just me and Ducky Doodle hitting the dusty trail.

After about a quarter-mile the road opens onto fields on each side, although one can always see trees lining the horizon. There are fewer trees near, and so on the windiest days I go south, but today the breeze is gentle albeit cool, and the sunlight on the golden stubblefields in the distance draws me north.

Wildflowers and weeds are still blooming in the ditch’s thick, tall green grass. A small flock of Canada geese is resting near a slough in the harvested field. 

I use the zoom function on the camera. If I stepped off the road, they'd all lift into the air.

Asters, breaking out in little bursts of colour all over.

Just over a half-mile up the road I turn, coming back past our yard and down the road to the south. 

Looking south from our place.

A red-tailed hawk startles from the long grass next to some bush by the road; it flies up, complaining at being disturbed, and carves a wide arc in the air, unwilling to get too far away from whatever it's been eating on the ground. I'm not quick enough to get a closeup with the camera. I'm too busy watching the hawk.

Harebells

On one side of the ravine a family of mousey-coloured ducks floats on the water, and across the road there is what looks like the beginnings of a beaver lodge on the far shore. They have got the culverts blocked and the RM will have to come and clear them out.

Just past this point we come to the correction line. A three-minute walk to the east would take us to Godhes', where Scott grew up, where he goes every day to attend to farm business, and where his mother lives alongside his brother and brother's family. 

The correction line is often as busy as the highway several more miles to the south, so this is where I turn back.

A swathed canola field waits to be combined.

I see the hoof print of a young moose, and a tiny deer track, and coyote scat with rose hips in it. 

A merlin flies low over the cut oat stalks and passes overhead; I haven’t seen as many merlins this year as in others.

Home again:

The grass road leading into our back yard.

How many times have you come along with me on this walk?

Today, with the weather perfect and the entire day ahead, we went three miles.

WHAT IS A CORRECTION LINE? CLICK HERE. 

After Work

Production days — Fridays, when the week's collection of files for the Monday newspaper goes to the printer — are long ones. Jean doesn't work them anymore. Charlene wanders in for a few minutes in the afternoon and then goes her merry way. Our high school student has been in for an hour and is long gone. Bev begins wrapping up her front desk business so she can leave and lock the door at 5:30. Lee shuts off his computer and heads for home.

"You're missing all the fun!" I tell him as he prepares to walk out the door. "After hours: that's when we gals whip off our bras and get crazy!"

"I'm sure," he chuckles and waves goodbye.

Alison, Rita and I are left to finish the pages and get them sent. Occasionally the three of us go for a meal and a beer together when the job is done. Last night we walked out of the office shortly after 7 and strolled over to T & T Café on Main Street. It was a glorious, calm evening, pretty dark already. You almost hated to go into another building after being inside all day.

Alison and Rita agree: Damn that cold beer tastes fine.

Rita is left-handed, so I have a seat to myself. We are all having Cantonese chow mein. Our friendly waiter, who owns the place with his wife, places our order in the kitchen and stops to chat with the other customers in the restaurant, which closes in less than an hour.

The kid who abhors my "silly" singing has posted something to his page: http://goldengrainfarm.blogspot.ca/p/love-letters.html.
I keep telling him we turn into our parents eventually.
Think this is evidence?

Wedding Pics

Scott brought digital photographs home from Calgary and had a picture show when Faye and Rick came over last night.

Gunnar and Melissa's neighbour owns a fleet of vintage cars and lent a few for the entourage:

Waiting for the wedding party

It was cold and rainy and some of these cars had neither windows nor wipers, if I heard correctly.

After the ceremony and reception, a crew piled into a limo to go have pictures taken:

The groom is older than he looks.

Oh all right — the real groom.

One of Those Nights

Everyone has them once in a while: a night when you go to bed tired, yawning, ready to snuggle in and fall asleep, and then you lie there awake until well into the wee hours. 

I had left the office at 5:30 to come home and bake a chocolate cake for Scott. I'd cleaned the kitchen and waited for him to arrive, because we'd talked about it in the morning and decided we'd either go out for supper or he'd bring a pizza from Kelvington, where he was shingling his 106-year-old grandmother's garage roof. 

But by the time he drove into the yard around 7:30, pizzaless, it was too late to run to town for supper. He'd need to bath first, and the restaurants close at 8 o'clock. So much for birthday plans! We sat chatting on the couch for a long while as he drank a cold beer (which I fetched; it was his birthday, after all), and then he went and lay in the tub for an hour with his iPhone. We ended up eating pork chops and fried cabbage sometime after 9 o'clock. 

And then he tucked into that cake, two or three helpings of it, and turned on the TV. That's when I got my pyjamas on and got into bed with The Orchardist.  I'd enjoyed the first half of it but now, by the second half, I'm skimming through. Around 11 o'clock I put it down and turned on the radio to listen to The Vinyl Café and then As It Happens. Usually I fall asleep somewhere in there, but not last night. I was too warm, I was too cold, I was too crowded, I was — who knows. 

It was just one of those nights. 

The Good Fortune of Some

Listening to the news is too often like listening to an audio book of short horror stories. 

A young father in Alberta has been murdered and his two-year-old daughter kidnapped and killed.

People by the hundreds of thousands or is it millions are on the road because they're not safe in their homes and cannot build a life there, and one country has actually built a fence to keep them out. If they starve and freeze, so what! Not our problem, even when they're on our doorstep, apparently.

Oil companies and manufacturers — and the people who operate them — are polluting our air, water, and land as if the planet is an endless supply dump for them to take what they want from and leave their mess behind, making people and animals sick.

The wealthy, to whom, for many, money and abundance came easy, due to luck and not to personal merit, cannot understand that the poor can work very, very hard and can make the best of the choices they have (if any), and still not escape poverty. The rich will vote in the government that protects their own money and screws over the people who don't have big bucks to donate to the election campaign.

Then there's me, with my cosy little house and the peaceful, lovely landscape around my quiet road. A dull story in comparison, but it's the one I prefer. I think I'll leave the radio off for a few days.

Geese are Here

With the rain, harvest has come to a halt. Quite a few farmers seem to have their crops off, though. The rest will just have to wait for dry weather.

The first large flocks of Canada geese have begun to pass overhead. You hear them gabbling before they hove into sight. It's a great time of year to be here.

Fall has its own unique scents as well as its sights and sounds. It's one of my favourite seasons, and every bit as welcome as springtime.

Scott turns 56 tomorrow. Wish him a happy birthday if you see him! Looks like this year he won't be in the field; maybe I'll take him out for supper. At the very least, I'll make the cake he has requested: chocolate, no icing, so he can pour milk on it. (Yuk! but whatever the birthday boy wants ... .)