Fall walk

Vancouver Island fall colours, a palette heavy on the russets and cordovans, soft yellows and mosses that range from whispers to screams in their green-ness. Lovely, leathery salal and mushrooms galore, of course… perfect hideaways for wee folk. The forest duff is dotted with stones wrapped in moss mantles. Nature getting it right, as usual.

Apropos of nothing Vancouver Island style

Just what today looked like. Bluebells in the meadow on the airport lands at Pat Bay. Dusk. Barnacles and oysters. You know, the usual.

And, oh internet… I remember when you were born. I remember how I recoiled at how unattractive the yahoo interface was, and how great google's was. And I remember my delight at discovering commercial-free internet radio. Introducing me to new music, music like this. 

February browns

Overheard in the shoe store "what IS cordovan, anyway? I've never heard of it!" This, from the salesperson, not the customer. 

I bought my boots, resisted the urge to mutter 'leather! red-brown!' and came home thinking about beauteous browns.

Random Vancouver Island goodness below:  Leaning tree on a pebbly beach, seaweed melange, February skies, and lovely things made by talented people.

L to right: cards from Dancing Rabbit Press, Iphone case handcrafted at Bonspiel Creations, and Weeds print from Jo Waterhouse. 

Objects that spark joy in this particular Vancouver Island household, along with my new boots. :)

Oh!, and, ducks—big, little, predominately brown. Winter is very ducky around these parts. 

Overheard on the seaside walkway near my place. 

"What are those?" 

Response. "I dunno, sum kinda' ducks". 

Decent pictures of our wintry duck tourists on my phone have not been a success, so, thank you, Internet, for the profiles below. 

New Year—the view from here

☞

sticks and stones

The beach where I live is a shape-shifter. Winter storms bring new detrius and take away the old…the logs, the seaweed, even the surface on which we tread. 

Summer beaches are pebbly and strewn with kelp and seagrass; peppered with white clam and oyster shells and many crab carapaces. Sand beaches usually only come in winter. Gifts from the sea.

Log shop on the beach…someone has plans to cart this beauty away after it has dried. Let's hope it's not for firewood.

 Still life with flipflop. Footwear is the most common beach junk to wash ashore.

Farewell October

 Vancouver-Island-style fall colour… brought to you by Alder, Birch, Nootka Rose and Hawthorne.

We really enjoy sharing the road with horseback riders. 

Almond sugar cookies for the trick or treaters who failed to show up. Sigh. 

Magnificent Madrones at Patricia Bay 

That was Then, This is Now

Weather has turned, finally.
Good-looking skies, no matter what.

~ and apropos of nothing ~

“I wish I was a kid again, when I had all the answers.” 
―S.E. Hinton, That was Then, This is Now

My buddy Bert

When I moved to Sidney about 4 years ago… it was a revelation to find so much going on in what I had previously thought was just a sleepy little community of retirees. Oh sure, there are retirees aplenty; but sleepy, they are not. Take this fellow, for example. Emigrated to Canada as a young man, worked for municipalities in Ontario and B.C. all his life. Took up basket making in 1981, after years of thinking he wasn't interested in what had been his father's work.
I'm the proud owner of three of Bert's baskets. He gives away as many as he sells, and the price he sells them for is pretty much the same as just giving them away.
He said in July that at the end of this summer he was packing it in, it's too hard on his heart. I nodded, and waited. At my visit today, he admitted he might just reconsider. Having used up all of the seasoned willow he cut last year, and his stock of baskets gone; he's going bonkers with nothing to do. :)
Harvesting the willow happens in December. Come June… Bert, I hope, will be weaving baskets again.

Summer's end

Summer is winding down. Late-blooming hollyhocks tell me 'don't be sad—we'll be back next year…'

Soon the ferry will go back to it's winter schedule, and I'll need my rain boots for beach walks.

Poet's Shooting Star

In Victoria there's a magnificent hill park called Mt. Tolmie. I used to think of it as my stairmaster, as our house was a good 15-minute, heart-pumping walk uphill to get to the base, and then the cooldown— a slow saunter through the meadows, zig-zagging through the grass paths; on the lookout for ephemeral spring flowers. These dodecatheon come in white, too, and take 3 years to bloom from seed. 

Weather with you

weather with you…a song lyric you'll recognize if you are of a certain age and a Crowded House fan. (1:08 and 3:36 ♥).  Sorry about the ad before the video, but I think it's worth the wait. But then I would walk over hot coals for a vintage Neil Finn fix any day. 

We've had every sort of weather under the ☀ ☁ ☂ ☃ these last couple of weeks. I'm not complaining; it makes a nice change from weeks-on-end of blustery, rainy grey.

The lovely painting of Mt. Baker is from the Sidney Museum, an underground rabbit warren of tiny perfection and a perfect hideout on those wet, cold days. 

See you next year

Sailboats, seagulls and Mt. Baker…

2013 winds down on the Salish Sea.

Gray Day

We're back to our gray skies and persistent low pressure systems… the gray shades and hues are quite beautiful and remind me of the colour of the canadian battleships my husband served with during his years in the Canadian Navy.

Good weather for walks, (no serious rain yet) — we head out and wave 'hello' at the ferry, watch the cormorants sitting on the pilings and troll the beach for flotsam to drag home and assemble into a diorama.