Escape to Tucson

My friend Kath is renting a house in Tucson for a couple of weeks and invited me to join her for part of the time.  Needless to say, I jumped at the chance to escape the cool greys of Vancouver Island in April.

Tucson is one of my "home" places. It's a city that I've been to several times and I'm always entranced by its desert surroundings, the Anglo/Latino/Native culture and its artistic vitality.

So anyway--I fly south tomorrow and I'll do a few posts to show you difference between Vancouver Island's April and Tuson's April. Here are two photos taken on a previous trip to give an idea of what I'll be experiencing. Please note the colour of the sky!

The amazing voice of Eva Cassidy

How wonderful that we have the opportunity to make new discoveries of musicians, artists and writers any time of our life. I can't think how it is that I've never heard of Eva Cassidy before.  My painting instructor played a CD of her songs yesterday and I was blown away by her amazing voice and delivery.

Eva was a shy young woman who never gained the fame she deserved and sadly she died of cancer in 1996 at age 33.

Just listen to this song and I bet, like me, you'll run to the nearest source to get some of her music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGwDYBWEDSc

Here's a brief excerpt from Wikipedia. If you click on the blue song titles you can see videos of the songs:

Eva Cassidy

Vocalist

Eva Marie Cassidy was an American vocalist and guitarist known for her interpretations of jazz, blues, folk, gospel, country and pop classics. Wikipedia

Born: February 2, 1963, Washington, D.C. Died: November 2, 1996, Bowie Last album: Simply Eva Music group: Method Actor

Songs

Fields of Gold	1997	Live at Blues Alley
Songbird	1997	Eva by Heart
Somewhere Over the Rainbow	2001	Now That's What I Call Music! Vol 48
Time After Time	2000	Time After Time
Autumn Leaves	1997	Live at Blues Alley
Over the Rainbow	1998	Songbird
What a Wonderful World	1997	Live at Blues Alley
At Last	2000	Time After Time
Wade in the Water	1997	Eva by Heart
Danny Boy	2002	Imagine
True Colors	2003	American Tune
Imagine	2002	Imagine
Ain't No Sunshine	2000	Time After Time
The Water Is Wide	2003	American Tune
Kathy's Song	2000	Time After Time

Who am I posting for?

Another week has slipped by without my posting here.  I don't know where the time goes.  Every day or so I think of something I'd like to post about but somehow there I am at the end of the day and the post hasn't been written.

In March, I was going to do a post about the first day of Spring in Victoria with photographs of budding trees and flowers. I even took the photographs, but before I knew it the first day of spring was a week ago.

I was going to write about making my grandmother's ham noodle recipe, a true version of after-Easter comfort food.


I even took the photographs but then another day slipped past and it was too late to refer to Easter.  (By the way, if you want the recipe, I'll create a post so you can try it, although you probably have your own version.  Hint: it includes cream of mushroom soup.)


I've been busy painting and was going to do a post about how my paintings evolve, complete with photographs of a painting at different stages. I even took some photographs.  But that painting isn't finished yet and I'm not even sure I like it.  In any case it seems premature to post about it now.



Sometime I get to wondering who exactly I am posting for.  Is it for myself? Or for my family?  Or my blog friends? At one point I had a lot of blog friends. I was reading and commenting on their blogs and they were doing the same on mine.  But in recent months I haven't seemed to find the time to do much reading of other people's blogs.

I do have some friends and family who keep up with what's going on in my life by reading my blog.  For them I think a posting every couple of weeks is probably just fine.

So it really comes back to whether I'm getting anything myself out of creating these posts.  The answer is: yes and no. When I'm in the mood I love sitting down to my computer and writing about things that I've been thinking about or doing. And I like being able to go back and look at posts from a while back to remember what I was doing and thinking back then. But when my life speeds up the blog posting gets put on the back burner for a while and sometimes I feel guilty. But really that's just silly.

I think I'll just post when I feel like it.  And not kick myself if days or weeks go by.  That seems to work for me at this point.

Garden work

Now that the weather has warmed up we've all been inspired to get out into the back yard and do some work.  Even Sue (who lives in our downstairs suite) has got into the act. She's an avid gardener and has offered to take on the vegetable garden which has been sadly neglected the past two years. We are lucky to have her expertise and good company. 

Meanwhile Harry is prettying up the garden shed by adding window trim and straightening up the grape arbour.

And as for me, I've been reading up on pruning through Cass Turnbull's marvelous book and have been cutting back the grapes and tidying up the plum tree.

I guess we can safely say that the season of garden work has begun.  We enjoy it when the weather's nice and it beats paying to exercise at the gym.

Images from an early morning walk

Spring is coming to Haliburton Hill and sometimes we even get some sunshine.  Earlier this week I took a walk with my camera.  Here's what caught my eye.

Sun glowing on the red/green Arbutus branches

Long shadows on the road as the sun comes up

Brightly lit skunk cabbage flowers that popped up in the swampy pond in the woods.

Happy Spring!

Trusted house sitters

The other day we took a ferry trip to Mayne Island to visit our housesitters Peter and Deb.  They are a wonderful couple who took care of our dogs for 17 days while we went to Mexico in February.

We are so lucky to have found a fabulous way to link up with people who are happy to come and stay in our house and take care of Maggie and Geordie while we take trips.  We connected with them through a website, Housecarers.com, where we were able to post an ad about our house and our dogs to find house sitters who wanted to come to Vancouver Island.  It cost us nothing to post the ad and the house sitters will take care of our dogs for free.  In exchange they get to stay in our house and use our car to explore this part of the world. It's a win-win situation.

Peter and Deb are from Australia and are dedicated travellers and dog lovers. They rented out their house in Perth and have been house sitting their way around the world for almost three years.  They tell us that there are several house sitting websites that they use to connect with homeowners all over the world who are looking for reliable people to come and mind their houses.

They responded to our ad on the housecarers website because the dates were perfect for them. They were house sitting in the Yukon until early February and then were going to Mayne Island (just a short ferry ride away from here) for five weeks at the the end February.  We e-mailed them and talked with them on Skype and checked their excellent references so we felt comfortable in making the arrangements.

Of course it's a bit of an act of faith to invite people you haven't actually met to come and stay in your house.  But through the magic of Skype where we were able to have some in-depth conversations about our dogs and their needs and about their background we felt comfortable with it.  We picked them up at the airport when they flew in from the Yukon, put them up in our spare room and spent the next morning going out and about with the dogs.  By the time we left that afternoon we were confident that they would be able to take good care of our pups and our home.  And in fact they did. Peter took charge of Geordie and handled him beautifully. They even sent us photos and videos of our dogs while we were away.

To top it all off, they picked us up at the ferry when we arrived back and brought us home to a wonderful meal and a couple of happy dogs and a squeaky clean house.  What more could we ask for?


Well actually, there's even another bonus.  We now have some new friends.  Like I said, we visited them at their current housesit on Mayne Island and spent a fun afternoon hiking through a lovely area there.  Here are Peter and Deb with Maggie and Geordie on Mayne Island.

The other sites Peter and Deb have mentioned are Trusted Housesitters and Mind My House.

Apparently there are a lot of people out there who are wanting to come and take care of your house and dogs and if you do your homework you can find some wonderful people like Peter and Deb so you can go off on a trip knowing that everything will be taken care of at home.