Come See

Our House is not completely finished or fully furnished but we've proven that it is party-ready so we're having our long-delayed house-warming open house.

Saturday afternoon & evening, January 2nd.

Everyone is welcome to come any time after 3pm. (Knowing us we'll just be finishing up our current project at 2:55)
Email me for address and directions.
We'll be happily giving tours of the house and our kitchen will be stocked with lots to eat, maybe even some food that doesn't contain left-over turkey.

(I know I'm safe posting an invitation publicly here because I get weekly reports on how many readers I have & even if every single person who reads my blog comes to the party they'll all be able to comfortably fit in the master bathroom at the same time.)

Here are some of our latest projects:

Installed the monorail lights over the kitchen island.
If they look familiar, they are: the pendants match the ones in the dining room.

Our powder room was a truly collaborative affair: tiling by Jem; fir walls with jatoba detail & cedar pedestal by Kim. You'll have to come & see how it all looks properly put together.

Kim sitting down on the job, gluing down the landing and step.
"Kim are you really going to allow people to actually step on that, with their feet even?"

Phew!

This is what Christmas dinner for 32 & 1/2 (for first time in ten years we had a toddler at dinner, little cutie-pie Anna-Lisa) looks like in our house. (click on pics to see full-size)
We didn't actually need all 32 chairs because by the time the last diners got their plates filled the first ones through had already inhaled mass quantities, as only teenagers can, and left for an important 'Rock-Band' engagement upstairs.

It was just a little frantic getting everything ready on time, considering we were still tiling, sanding and installing paneling and trim up until the 23rd but we managed to pull it off. There was a mad rush to vacuum & dust away all the sawdust (Thanks Mom!) and re-arrange our furniture to accommodate four long tables in the living room.

"The fourth table goes right here."

Only once did I get to the point where I had to remind Shea that "when your Mom is acting all stressed-out like this it's best to talk to her in calm, soothing tones". Referring to yourself in third-person always lets them know just how close to the edge you're getting.
We supplied the turkeys, hams and potatoes while everyone else arrived with the rest of the feast.

Dinner was a little later than expected (I lingered over our lovely champagne brunch at Tammy & Alain's and my turkey wouldn't pop itself into the oven even when I phoned it and asked nicely) and we ran a little short of mashed potatoes (Grandma's potato calculations didn't take into consideration the abundance of teenage boys in our family, all starving by the time my turkey was done) but, other than that, everything ran very smoothly.

Kim and I want to give HUGE THANKS to:

Poppa/Dad/Don
for taking on all carving duties and dish-scraping afterwards;

Grandma/Mom/Sally
for cleaning, cooking, organizing, helping and all-around Mom-type support;

For their centre-piece building and table-decorating skills, Tammy(centre) and Alain(left) now AKA "Glitter-boy" after having waaay too much fun when Tam took him to Michael's for supplies.

And to everyone else for making it such a wonderful evening, and showing Kim that we could comfortably fit that many people in our living room. Love you all.

Aftermath. This is the last picture taken that evening. Four cousins and an Aunt: Heather, Tammy, Jem, Erin, Floralee.

Interesting fact I learned: even a 1:1 ratio of Bailey's to coffee does not diminish the effects of caffeine if you're not accustomed to drinking coffee at 10pm. On the upside, it sure was nice to wake up to a spotless kitchen with every inch of counter vigorously scrubbed clean.

A Quick Zoe Update

Here's proof that our Zoe is feeling like her old mischievous rascally self again:

There's still no sign of life in her tail but I think we'll wait until after Christmas to amputate it. Don't want a sulking kitten moping about during the holidays.
(Although, on second thought it would be safer for our decorations.)

Oh dear, the Christmas tree.
And she thought toilet paper was fun.

Swappery-doo-da

This year I'm participating in the annual Clayamies Christmas Ornament Swap again after not having a space to make ornaments in for the past two Christmases.

I had a great idea for something interesting and a little different but after a couple of attempts I realized that the design that worked so well in my head would require a lot more real life design (& engineering) hours to get it to work than I was willing to spend. Filed it away in the box with all my other great ideas that didn't quite work. Am going to need a much bigger box soon.

Got nervous when I started to hear from some keeners who had already finished the maximum of 20 ornaments and I was still trying come up with a new idea - I now needed something simple that I could whip up a bunch of very fast. (I may have been guilty of going a little overboard in the past so I'm due for making some smaller, simpler ornaments than say, the giant pinwheels I made one year - sorry guys, I'm sure those ones blew everyone's postage budget to hell)

In the meantime I went to Julie Picarello's wonderful workshop at Linda's house in Deep Cove.

Here's a horrible photo of a slice of the Mokume I made in her class.

As a quick aside to the main course of Mokume, she showed a cute little thing to do with the scrap ends of Mokume blocks that she calls a lizard tail.

My Lizard tail.

Came home, started playing around and made some Julie's-lizard-tails-inspired twisted candy-canes.


Except I used a striped block of clay instead of thin sheets;
and I twisted them instead of rolling;
and didn't use any of the gold leaf that gives Julie's sparkle;
and I used no Ecru in my colours, strictly clear bright candy cane colours;
and I didn't taper them - (who would want a pointy, already-sucked-on candy-cane?);
and I cut them in 4 sections, not 2;
and.... Hmmmm, I guess my weird little candy canes really don't have much similarity to Julie's lizard-tails after all, except for the fact that they both have a mirror-image effect.
Julie's class DID remind me of the mesmerizing effect that those mirror images have on our brain.
I made an even dozen of them, a perfectly respectable amount for the swap. It means I get back a dozen ornaments from clayers across the country.
I can't wait.

In the past I've put all my swapped ornaments on a wreath but this year it was too crowded to fit all of them.
And I haven't even received this years' batch.

I'm going to have to get a small artificial tree, just for my treasured polymer clay collection.
Or a second "overflow" wreath.

From the 'Z' Files: A Sad Tail

That's not a typo, our little Zoe has a broken tail.

We don't know how it happened, we found her sulking on the couch last week, hissing and saying "Meowch"when any pats got too close to her tail.

Her collar was found in the middle of the crosswalk so we feared an encounter with a car but the vet says she doesn't have the claw damage that usually indicates 'car'. Maybe a cyclist since we are on a bike lane? Who knows? Whatever it was, let's hope she's learned not to follow kids across the road.

She should have been feeling fine by now but, silly young thing, she refused to follow Doctor's orders to rest & stay quiet.
THIS is where we found her on Thursday....

See her poor tail... hangs straight down like a plumb-bob.

Not long after grounding her from any further ladder acrobatics I was on the phone telling Kim that she seemed to have some of her bounce back when I saw two white paws grab onto the edge of the kitchen island...... then slip off.
She hit the floor rump-first, right on her broken tail.
She did not bounce.

Oh the yowling and the howling. and the growling and the yowling.

She slunk off slowly, straight to her travel crate. The crate that she complains non-stop about being in when we go to the vet? That one that she hates so much?
She spent the rest of the day in there, snuggling a stuffed chicken.

Unfortunately we haven't seen any signs of life in the tail, it just drags behind Zoe, hitting the floor with a "thunk" when she jumps down from the couch.
At this point it's a liability since she has no feeling or control over it so it looks like it'll have to be amputated.
Now all the other cats will laugh at her and call her stumpy.

I said maybe we could get her tail bobbed at the same time as we get her spayed.
Kim replied that if she gets her tail cut off we won't have to spay her because none of the boys will want anything to do with her.

Don't listen to him Zoe, you'll still be the prettiest kitty on the block, stubby tail and all.

Crawling through the weekend

It's ironic that now that I supposedly have plenty of time on my hands, unexpectedly unemployed bum that I am, I would find it so hard to find the time to post to my blog.
It's not that I have a shortage of subject matter. I could write about my polymer clay guild and the swap I organized; or about setting up a mini-studio and starting to, well, at least to condition some clay; or about our gorgeous new built-in shelves; or, about the garden design class I took.

All of those will wait. One of our favourite events happened this weekend.

This weekend I had planned to finish our downstairs 1/2 bathroom. With at least 3 parties scheduled (including Christmas dinner for 34) it might be a good idea to have the guest bathroom and stair landing finished enough that we can re-hang the bathroom door. I have a feeling most people would appreciate some privacy.

My good intentions were thwarted by Kim - the East-side Culture Crawl was on and we spent both Saturday & Sunday wandering around artist's studios wishing we had a winning lottery ticket.

Saturday we got off to a late start so Shea came alone. I think it's pretty cool that we have a 15-year-old son who WANTS to spend an afternoon with his parents looking at art. OK, maybe not the "with his parents" part so much but how else was he was going to get to the studios? He has very definite tastes too, even if his expression of them is very brief, limited to either "meh" or "I want" when asked for his opinion. Sorry kid, $1,300.00 is a little beyond Santa's budget for a painting for your bedroom.

Fortunately most of what we fell in love with was so far out of our budget that they were no temptation. It's the works that had fewer than 3 zeros in the price that were painful.
Almost within reach - but do we really want to be spending our money on paintings when we still need furniture? and landscaping?
I consoled myself by buying a very cool cast porcelain vase (or drinking glass).
"Hey Kim, I'm doing your Christmas shopping for you again. See what you're giving me - a porcelain canning jar". Reminds me of all the canning my Mom did when I was growing up.
I can't remember the artist's name - Heyday design I think? and her business card was a soggy victim of another broken teapot this morning. I've broken so many I'm now officially a serial teapot-murderer. (but hey, now you know what to get me for Christmas)

We also bought a small 8x8" piece. A photo transfer on gesso. Taken in the artist's front yard this summer, the garden that we tramped through to get to his studio.
That's what's so wonderful about the Culture Crawl - the closer connection to the artists. The ceramic artist even had a story about where she found the canning jar she made her mold from.
This is another nostalgic piece for me: I loved the bleeding hearts we had growing in front of the house we moved away from when I was 7. Pink Monkey Studio is the artist (can't remember his name either and too lazy to go check the back of the picture right now) and he's donating proceeds from his bleeding heart series to the Heart & Stroke foundation. That's what cinched our decision between the bleeding heart and the birch trees.

Must remember to add a bleeding heart to my landscape plan.

This little piggy...

I'm not very happy.
If I'm going to lose two or three productive days to the flu I at least want one symptom to be "loss of appetite" so I have the benefit of being a few pounds lighter by the end of it.
But no, this one hit me just hard enough that I didn't have enough energy to do anything except lie around eating. (Doesn't help that I spent the evening before it hit baking & hadn't yet hidden, I mean put away, the results.)

'Swine Flu' is right.
OINK OINK