Day 8 and 9

The “no hydro” saga continues since we are living through the aftermath of no heat.  There are more pages but I’m so “over them”.  Here are my final two. 

We have signed a contract for a new furnace but it can’t be installed for several weeks.  Supply and demand and all that rot.  I hope the heater in the basement will help.  We have little space heaters on the main floor but they aren’t really sufficient when the temps are below 0C.  It was -5C when I woke up this morning which was warmer than it has been. 

You just can’t believe how excited I got when I saw a hydro truck pulling a green hydro pole pass by the laneway.  Thankful that we have a rain barrel so we could flush the toilet.  Especially good that we also had our ice chipper within easy reach. 

I’m so happy that so many regions in Canada came to our aid by sending their trucks and personnel.  Timmins, in northern Ontario, is a 6 hour drive.  I expect that Alberta and Manitoba is several days, New Brunswick a day at least; Quebec could be almost a day depending where they were sent from.  I’m probably missing some others but this is what I can recall. 

We had some branches on the hydro line, the crew stopped to cut them down.  The young fella I was talking to was from Orangeville, a smaller city bit over an hour’s drive southwest.  He said they were working 16 hour days! Yikes!  We told him a big thank you and told him we appreciated his/their work.  

I have a love/hate relationship with Hydro One, our only electricity provider in this rural area.  Our power is out-frequently, a few hours to a part day at a time, it is ridiculous.   Many years ago it was out for 4 days but it was in May when the spring thaw is over.  The last big outage goes back to August 2003 when it was out for what seemed like forever too.  

Today is my last day for the antibiotic eye drops.  Amazing that such a tiny bottle could hold enough meds for 14 days (X3).  Wearing the shield at night was no biggie really, just a minor annoyance.  Regardless, I’m happy that I don’t need it anymore! 

Day 4 and 5

Just so I won’t bore you all to tears about our “no hydro” saga, I’m posting two days pages.  They might be a bit entertaining.  

The Ever ready battery (bunny) company makes rechargeable batteries that I bought (boy they aren’t cheap) but I quickly learned that I need hydro to charge them back up! 

When Day 5 rolled around, I was still hopeful and hadn’t lost my sense of humour yet.  So what would a generator say to a gas can?!?

Cataract surgery

We had a horrible ice storm that took out our hydro the night before my cataract surgery.  I was surprised to be told that my surgery was still a go since the hospital was on auxiliary power supply.  Yippee for me! 

So I’ll be posting my sketchbook journal pages from the beginning of last week.  No hydro means no wifi.  I didn’t want to use up the power on my phone for social media.

Happy St Paddy’s Day

It pelted down rain yesterday and then would stop for a bit then did that over and over again.  We lost a lot of snow which is good but that switches to not so great when considering the soggy ground.  Thank goodness for my new clodhoppers, they will come in handy now. 

You can barely see my 3 red-winged black birds in my photo here but you can almost see them if you really look.  They are a whole flock under the feeder right now.  They aren’t showing their red wings quite yet since it is still early in the season and chilly (-3C) but the temperatures are rising today. 

Happy St Patrick’s Day to all!  I’ll be having a wee beverage to celebrate later.  Memories of visiting Ireland with my parents as a kid.  My father was trying to find my great grandfathers grave while we were there. 

Walking on water

Some years ago I took a sketchbook class with Karen Stamper, a UK artist.  I made this spread in my Seawhite of Brighton accordion sketchbook.  It made me think of Lake Simcoe  in the winter (3 mins by car, 20 or more minutes if we walk through the bush).  The year I did this, it was too warm and the ice was unstable so we didn’t go out.  The next year, my knee was killing me so I didn’t go out again.  This year, this past Monday, it was a beautiful sunny day, so I went out.  I finally got to “walk on water”!!  Yay me! 

There is about 7 - 10 inches of ice covered by loads of snow.  That makes me happy because the last time I was out there was a lot of “black ice” on the lake.  It creeps me out to look into the abyss like that.  Yes, black ice is a scary thing especially when you’re driving too! Ugh! When you start sliding, there is nothing you can do but keep calm and hope you can slide through it without damaging your car. 

As you can see there are a lot of thin layers: line work, stamping, stencilling, paint, napkin, gluing and a silk tie for the landscape and clouds.  Yup, this isn’t something I normally do.  I had loads of fun making this and I have lots of pages to work on yet. It isn’t the type of project that is necessarily finished, I even tweaked this page.

My first robin for 2025

I was thrilled to see my first robin who is our harbinger of spring.  After this horrible winter, I am more than happy to know spring is around the corner.  The red wing black birds are back too (although it is too soon for them to show their colours).  I love hearing their twittering at the bird feeder.  This page is from a photo I took.

I’ve added a photo of the wild turkeys who continue to stop by for a snack. 

Stitching on paper

I’ve been creating outside of my sketchbook. 

This year I started watching Lisbeth Degn, a Danish artist, on U-tube.  I wanted to document this week’s project so I wouldn’t forget just how much I love stitching on paper. 

To make this, I just had to remind myself to go slowly and take even more thread than I thought necessary.  I didn’t quite make it  on my prototype (missed it by one).  I used Perle cotton size 12.  It’s a white on white pice so I found a dark paper to put behind it. 

My final project is below in the comments.  I used different sized holes and threads and I increased the aperture.  Personally I prefer the larger circle with a small aperture.  I backed it with a piece of brown paper that had some paint and marks on it. 

I made an error that couldn’t figure out where exactly I went wrong,  so I left it.  I’m living by the old maxim; “done is better than perfect”.