Elements

the view from my bench

One of the many magical things I’ve discovered about Esquimalt is the wilder side of Victoria’s Inner Harbour – this lovely little part of the Capital Regional District features a coastline of tiny mountaintops poking up through the ocean, gusty winds at unexpected intervals, and an up-hill/down-dale topography that provides a better workout than anything I could probably get in a gym. And the same stunning view of the Olympic mountains is as readily available here as it was from the Ocean Room.

A recent flânerie took me, with my Canon, down to Saxe Point Park, the “over the bridge” version of Beacon Hill that features far fewer flower beds and a slightly less cultivated atmosphere than my former stomping ground. I walked the park’s perimeter with the ocean on my right and the urban forest on my left, until I rounded the point and came upon a wooden bench situated with a rock rise at its back and a stunning view of the water out front. By then a rest was welcome, so I sat down on the bench and took a minute to absorb the environment. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath in, let it out, and noted:

The sun’s warmth on my face;

The air stirring in my lungs;

The rock solid beneath my feet;

The sound of water gently lapping the shore.

In short, it was a perfectly pure mindful moment in which I was acutely aware of the four main elements that makes this world so beautiful. Wood and metal were also present in the bench beneath me, but this Virgo counts them with rock in the “earth” category.

This dimension is fraught with contrast. Life is not designed to be easy, but our loving, friendly and generous Universe has provided a glorious venue in which to find respite from the human experience. All we have to do is pay attention to it, and to ourselves. We are connected to the earth in ways we don’t fully comprehend, yet that moment on the bench at Saxe Point defined my connection more keenly than any book or documentary ever could.

It must have done, because I’ve remembered it.

Red Robin

Sometimes the best photo ops occur when I’m not expecting them.

I was on a flânerie during one of the first sunny days in March. I’d been out with the Canon, exploring the neighbourhood, following the bus route from the stop out front to the terminus at the top of the hill and back around to home again. My mission was primarily to take photos of the water from our new location, and one in particular to use with a blog post (see “View From Another Window”).

Mission accomplished, I’m walking toward the little church outside my building when I notice a lone robin hopping merrily around in the parking lot. At first it doesn’t register, but suddenly I decide the burnished red of its breast against the stone grey asphalt will make a good picture. So I stop. So does the robin. We eye each other for a second. I slowly reach for the camera and the robin, startled, hops away.

“Oh, no!” I exclaim in hushed alarm, “please, wait until I get a picture!”

Amazingly, the robin pauses. I raise the camera, hit the power button and take reckless aim, hoping the bird will be somewhere in the frame since I can always crop the photo later. Click! I lower the camera and the robin immediately bounces on its way.

Relieved, I offer a heartfelt thank you in its wake.

Only when I load the photos onto the computer do I realize the little guy did more for me than wait. He posed.

Did he hear my plea for him to linger?

You bet he did.

My Left Foot

lucky to live here

Flâneries have been verboten of late, due to the rebellion of an ankle injury that went untreated around two decades ago. I stepped off a curb and my foot went sideways. The tendons locked, the bones jammed, and over time, scar tissue has formed and arthritis—sigh—developed. The joint finally seized on me last summer, shooting pain all over the place, so I’ve not been walking as much as I once did. I can do short stints, but I haven’t hiked home from work in months. It simply hurt too much.

My massage therapist suggested orthotics after a number of acupuncture treatments only accomplished so much. I was thinking about where to get them when I noticed a sign on the wellness clinic that recently opened ten minutes from home: “Custom Orthotics”. Below that: “Walk-ins Welcome”.

Good sign for a podiatrist’s office, eh?

So I walked in. Six hundred dollars, six weeks, and six visits later, I’ve got the orthos and am seeing Chiropractor #2 specifically to address the wrecked ankle while my frame adjusts to the new insoles. I can’t believe that I pay my pit crew to hurt me, but you gotta do what you gotta do. He’s managed to get the joint moving again, and after a few hours of it venting its post-treatment spleen, I am winning the battle.

I went for my first “real” flânerie last weekend. I walked all along the water and back through the cemetery, and for three-quarters of the way, I was pain-free.

I was also taking pictures. Technology has also interfered—my lovely little Canon was semi-retired when Mr. Moto came on scene. The phone has a camera, albeit not a very good one, and I had taken it on the final few strolls before my ankle crapped out last summer.

So, on deciding to test my endurance with the orthotics, I also decided to blow the dust off the Canon and leave the cell phone at home.

What a beautiful day! Bright sun, brisk wind, pounding surf, and glorious mountains on the horizon. I was more in awe of my home than I’ve been in months. Now I’m all pumped because Easter is coming and I plan to get up early on the long weekend to watch the sun come up over the water.

I also hope to walk partway home a couple of times a week, just to get back in shape. I hadn’t realized how much I’ve missed walking through the ’hood, camera in hand, looking at heritage houses and breathing fresh salt air. It’s good to be reminded that I live in a place where other people spend their vacations, that I am alive and healthy and mostly mobile (getting better all the time), in short, incredibly lucky this time around.

Dumber Than My Phone

What with navigating around F***book (I’m still a bit … okay, a lot boggled) and surviving fiscal year end, I’ve not done much writing of late. I miss it, but that’s okay – I have a week’s vacation coming soon and a project in mind. That, however, is another post.

As part of my ongoing plan to become a social media savvy celebrity author, I turned in the old flip phone and bought a Smartphone last weekend. It’s a basic model compared to the iPhones and Samsung Galaxies floating around out there, but I have a pre-paid mobile account and didn’t want to commit (there’s that fear again) to a contract with my upgrade. So this little fellow is a Motorola E (or something), powered by Google Android, which freaks me out because the androids on Star Trek thought they were better than humans and, if not for JT Kirk and Co., would have taken over the world … I digress. Mr. Moto is less a phone than it is a tiny computer. Once I figure out how to drive it, it will check my email, keep my appointments, snap photos, upload said photos to FB, send and receive text messages, reflect my scintillating personality by way of varied ringtones and desktop wallpaper, stash any apps I accidentally download, and probably cost me way more than the thirty dollars per month I’ve budgeted for the privilege of ownership.

Yes, I’m totally lost. Well, not totally. Ter found the user’s guide online – via the big computer rather than the “mobile device” – so between us we deduced how to answer an incoming call after the first experiment failed. The device started ringing … actually, it started to play a boogie tune that had me grooving until I saw our landline number on the screen. Whoa, call display! How cool is that? But once startled into action, I couldn’t figure out how to connect to the call! So off it went to voice mail, and off I went to consult the manual.

Handy things, those manuals. Too bad hard copies don’t come with the product; switching from the computer screen to the phone screen can start a migraine faster than cheezies with a chocolate chaser. I’ve yet to delve much deeper into it than skimming the basics, but at least I can answer a call or choose to ignore it and then retrieve the voice mail. I was able to record an outgoing message by remembering which buttons to push once I call my own number; it helps to have a similar VM system at work. And the camera … let’s be truthful here. I bought it for the camera, for spontaneous pics and fast uploads; again, part of Ru’s cunning Media Savvy Plan. I adore my little digital Canon, but I don’t carry it with me every day and I have missed golden weekday photo ops, like the streetlamp lying on the boulevard. It looked like the eye of the Martian spaceship in the Gene Barry version of War of the Worlds and I would have taken a picture if only. So I guess I’ve really bought a camera that has a phone rather than a phone that has a camera, so does it matter if I can’t get Mr. Moto to play Darth Vader’s Imperial March when my father calls?

In this intellectual game of chicken with my phone, you bet it does.

Girl Friday

the view from my table

The problem, if it can be called a problem, with a day off is that my mind races frantically to jam as much pleasurable activity as possible into a finite number of hours. I ask Ter to drop me at the Moka House for tea and a blog entry, then I panic because I should be doing the bi-weekly dusting.

I can do that when I get home, of course, but that cuts into my writing time. And what about the “spa bath” I owe myself? Or baking the applesauce muffins I’ve been craving? And how many episodes of Ashes to Ashes can I manage before the sun breaks through to create a golden photo op in the garden? I want to read, too, being nearly done with Anne Rice’s latest …

It helps that, while I debated bringing the Canon on my morning tea/blog flânerie, Ter told me point-blank to “slow down, you’re trying to do too much.” It helps, too, that they’re playing Ella Fitzgerald at the coffee house; I pause to listen whenever I hear her smooth, buttery voice. And I am reminded of the Zen saying, “Nature does not hurry, yet all is accomplished.” Still, my “want to do” list is too long, so the next platitude is “pick the most important thing and the rest can wait.” Which is true. The most important thing is a no-brainer: write, write, write. and remember: the weekend lasts for more than one day.

So a reassuring thing happens as I sip my Asian Misto and tap my foot to Ella: I watch traffic speeding through the village and people with their knapsacks and travel mugs pounding along the sidewalk, and I wonder … What’s the rush?

Boo Yah!

When I was a kid, it was all about the candy. I didn’t play dress up, so my costumes were culled from the clothes rack of least resistance. The family didn’t decorate (few families did, in those days) and we didn’t carve pumpkins, either. Once I outgrew trick or treating (i.e, when I could afford sweets year-round), the spookiest night of the year lost its appeal.

Then I met Ter. Some of her happiest childhood memories involve October 31. She carved pumpkins, she dressed up, she read Tales From the Crypt; if it was creepy, ghostly or chilling, she was right there. (Ironically, she has never read Stephen King.) The only Halloweeny tradition we had in common was candy and watching Charlie Brown.

Over our years together, she has carved an annual jack o’lantern and done a little home decorating. One year I got an idea for my own pumpkin, so now I carve one, as well. We decorate for fall, and slip in a few spookables as nod to the ghosts. We’ve always lived in an apartment, so we’ve never handed out candy – the one exception being 2011, when we were briefly the sole residents of a little cottage on a shady street. Ter dressed as a barefoot witch and happily doled out treats by the mittful to an assortment of neighbourhood kids. I’ll always remember tiny little Layla, a toddler princess on her first trick-or-treating expedition, who was so dazzled by Ter’s costume that she forgot to collect her candy; her dad had to turn her back around so Ter could dispense the goodies.

Last year, we did nothing. Real life was scarier than the occasion could ever be – we had just moved house for the second time in two years, I was recovering from the worst cold of my life (until this year), and poor Ter was coming down with it. We carved no pumpkins, left the decorations in the boxes, and sniffled and coughed our way through a single viewing of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. I did manage to attend a magic lantern show hosted by our (then) new neighbours, and had such a good time that we were delighted to be invited back for it again this year.

Ah, this year. We’re both healthy. We’re settled into our new home. The weather was clear and cool, and the magic lantern show awaited. We stopped down to let the neighbours know we were heading out on a short flânerie, but would be along for the show, then we did what I love to do best of all: we walked through the ’hood, criss-crossing the street, sidestepping packs of chirping children dressed as superheroes, princesses, ghosts, goblins, pirates, vampires, Darth Vader and Jedi knights, mummies, teddy bears, ballerinas, witches, everything but the kitchen sink. I brought along the Canon to test its night-shooting powers, but mostly we marvelled at how some folks get so into the occasion that they dress up their homes as much as themselves. Truly, every kid should hunt treats in an old Victorian neighbourhood.

 

 

 

 

People turn their yards into cemeteries. They park zombies on the porch. Skeletons hang in darkened windows. Tortured screams and maniacal laughter drift through the thickening fog (yep, this close to the ocean and tendrils were crawling). The pumpkin art is amazing. Ter took me to what she calls “the magic house” – a stonework studio as well as a residence. The artist who lives there has created a captivating world of light and spirit that has drawn her there on foot since we moved here. The yard last night was … well, I took more pictures there than everywhere else combined:

 

 

An hour later, and we were cozied in the dining room downstairs, sharing with friends and neighbours the annual magic lantern show – glass-painted slides on a projector from the 1850s with a hilarious play-by-play from the presenter and colour commentary from the audience. We laughed and talked and had a wonderful time with warm and wonderful people. Last year was a boo hoo. This year was a big boo yah!

Full Moon Follies

Moonrise September 19, 2013

Every time things go pear-shaped, I check the calendar to discover that the moon is invariably full. This week was no exception. It culminated on Wednesday, when my world seemed so dark and distorted that I almost closed my office door to isolate myself from potential murder victims.

I got through the day by telling myself that the day was neither longer nor shorter than any other day and it too would pass. That said, I retired to bed at 8:00 with a massive headache and hope for a better tomorrow.

It worked. I woke feeling more stable, had a pretty good day yesterday, and when the sun went down, an opportunity to try some night shots with the Canon appeared in the swollen form of September’s full moon:

Playing with the camera settings to get these shots was fun, but truly, the best pictures were seen with the naked eye.

 

Today is my day off – gee, wonder if that had anything to do with my mood improving?? – and the moon is on the wane. The sunrise this morning was glorious, blue sky streaked with cotton candy ribbons and melting gold light pouring through the Ocean Room windows. No photos; I was still in my jammies while Ter got ready for work.

I plan to work with Shade some more, but I’m a little intimidated by an unforeseen twist in his story. It revealed itself this week and while it appears plausible, my job is to make it so. The trouble is that I know about it, but he doesn’t. Keeping the character ignorant for the duration is tricky because I can’t let it leak into the narration. It’s like discovering a shattering secret, dying to tell everyone, but being unable to tell anyone. My left brain has seized on the secrecy factor and is screwing with my creative function as a result: You can’t write that or That won’t work or What’s on HBO this morning?

Well, the best defence is a good offense, so I’d better go get offensive.

Happy Friday!

Sunrise, Sunset

Sunrise September 13. 2013

 
Ter sent me out last night to take pictures of the sunset (which I did) and since today is my last day of these holidays, it seemed an appropriate subject for the final daily post here at the Rebellion.
 
'Course, I had to take a couple of pics of the sunrise to go with it. Shooting into the sun can be a bit tricky, though - I really like this one, but the angle makes it look like it was taken from a rocking boat and the sun itself didn't make it wholly into the frame:
 

 
The mist created a neat effect, eh? Talk about shooting through a filter.
 
Last night's sunset was far more generous. It let me play with a few more camera settings:
 

 Automatic setting - the Canon did the work

vibrant blues

 

vibrant colours, period

toy camera (good for portraits, too)

 

This morning, I have plans to continue with Shade - he took me on an unexpected trip yesterday and I want to see how it ends before I quit for the nonce. I normally write for 2.5 days straight before needing a break; by the second half of the third day, my brain is too tired to create properly, so this afternoon, I shall hie myself to the village to collect my allowance (it's payday, yay!!), hit the g/f bakery and get some more of that really good veggie rice pasta Ter cooked up the other night, then maybe treat myself not to a chai, but to a frozen yogurt at the newly-opened Qoola shop. I can sit outside and scribble a card tag to Nicole. It's a nice, late summer day. I must take advantage of it. Writing is so absorbing that the world will pass me by if I don't pull out of my own head once in a while.

I'm happy with what I have accomplished, though. Big strides with the angels, growing affection for my protagonist, lots of Ru time, and much fun pointing my loose Canon. So, on that cheery note, the sun sets on my writing holiday:

Going once...

 

going twice ...

 

going ...

 

... going ...

 

gone

With love,

Canon Fodder

Ru's New Toy!!!!

I got a new camera for my birthday, and as it happens, the test phase coincided with Moon Pie’s determination to follow Ter on her outing this morning, starting with trying to hide in her purse …



Hm .. will I fit?

Busted!

Failing that, he decided to follow her down the stairs …

Changed his mind and tried to climb back up again …

Got close enough for me to pick him up …

... though I had to pry him off my leg when he got there.

So he contented himself with watching from the window as she drove away …

Now he's playing safely with his buddies while I play some more with my camera.

Ter goes back to work tomorrow, but I have another week in which to memorize the second half of the user's guide and attack Shade. The carpets are being cleaned tomorrow afternoon; after that, my time is my own ... unless Moonie decides to get into more mischief ...