Only Getting Better (and Bigger)

Whoever it is that is currently working on the Current Events Sign on Gulf Road and opposite the Post Office has struck again.  This time, seven or eight substantial rocks have been arranged in a kind of loose curve behind the sign.  I'm not exactly sure what the impulse might have been, and it does seem to me that seven is a bit of overkill for a relatively small space.  On the other hand, consider Stonehenge.  (Okay, it's a bigger space, but it has much bigger rocks, 30, 40 feet rather than 30, 40 inches.)

Anyway, the sign is apparently yet a work in progress, just like this country itself, 'vaguely realizing Westward.' (I think Robert Frost at the Kennedy inaugural.)

And who can know where it all will end?

Something New

Point Roberts is really just a disorganized (as opposed to organized) retirement community, with a lot of people who have a lot of time on their hands.  Some of that time gets used for projects that benefit some or all of the community (e.g., the lovely concerts that are offered virtually every other week featuring excellent musicians--often from Vancouver--at the Lutheran Church here).  Some of that time gets used on the ordinary bits and pieces of daily living.  But it is the other pieces of that time that fall prey to a tendency toward suggestibility.

I have such a tendency.  Thus, this week we are in the midst of several weeks of spectacular July weather.  It might be that there are a bunch of things that need to be done indoors, but it does not feel like indoors is the place you ought to be in a place where so often the weather is a tad on the dour side; beautiful, but damp, grey, etc.  Right now, though, the world is glowing and it seems, at the very least, best to be out there watching it glow and maybe even glowing with it.

Also, in the summer, people come to visit and bring you round to activities you might not engage in at all or at least not so much as when they have not come to visit you.  This past ten days, we have had a daughter visiting who comes with the skills of an engineer and the enthusiasm for projects of, well, I don't know...of a project enthusiast?  In this case, she has joined in with her father to restore great swaths of order to our somewhat disorderly doings: outbuildings and porches are cleaned and organized; tools and lumber are made orderly and accessible; things that should go to the dump are identified and transported.  So much work goes on every day that not working very hard seems a very slacker way to be living.

And, finally, another daughter sends a book about shade gardens.  In the first few chapters, which I idly read about 6 days ago, the author explained how he came upon the need for creating a shade garden adjacent to his house, a 'green room,' as he called it.  If this book had arrived in my life in May, I would have read it and enjoyed it and put it away.  But this past week, what with the weather and the project mood, the book forced me to follow its lead.  That's what I mean by suggestibility. 

Thus, over the past four days, I have taken to renovating a 20x20 foot space adjacent to the back of our tiny house and turned it, or begun to turn it into a 'green room.'  This area has never been cultivated in any organized way; it was covered with bushes and vines and grasses and buttercups and whatever.  The project required, of course, that all that be removed.  For two days, I simply dug up everything.  Then I began to find things to give it more shape (e.g., an elderly 8x4.5 foot metal roof that was lying around was pressed into service as a wall to create a corner with the existing wooden fence).  Half a dozen marble slabs that came from some other project that belonged to somebody who lived here before we did were lying around and were moved in to provide some paving.  Various stacks of rotting wood were moved out and other pieces of more useful wood were moved in.  Now there is a little deck where a chair can sit in case I want to sit in my shady green room.  And there is a rock.

And, said the book's author, don't buy plants; just transplant them from somewhere else in your garden.  Thus have I moved a hydrangea and a bunch of foxglove and lunaria plants, as well many little ground cover plants cuttings with roots or rootlets (creeping jenny and ajuga and lilies of the valley) into a concentrated area.  And some potted parsley and feverfew.  And a driftwood 'gate' that was providing no good in the back of the garden is now supported by a big alder and is being used to shelter my driftwood collection.

This has been a strange and frenetic piece of work.  Today, I began work on a long-time projected sculpture which involved initially saving about a thousand tin cans, which will eventually be stacked on five thin steel rods.  I had all the cans, mostly rusted, and now I have to drill holes in them all.  But that is underway.  It will take, of course, a number of years for this actually to become a shade garden or even a green room, but it has certainly been an astonishing beginning, and all because of a chance coming together of several factors and my propensity to drift into things with a sudden enthusiasm. 

Puzzled, Puzzling

We have grandchildren visiting this week.  It is possible that everyone has grandchildren visiting this week.  And it seemed a good idea to tidy up the fire pit in our back yard, given the splendid weather and the grandchildren, and cook a few marshmallows for an afterdinner treat.  We've never actually used the pit before, which is why it needed to be tidied up--there were weeds growing down in the concrete ring.  The thing is, we don't eat hot dogs or marshmallows as a rule.

Then, the question of a burn permit came up, given that we are not supposed to be burning yard trimmings right now and the information, vaguely obtained, was that we needed a recreational burn permit in order to toast those marshmallows.  Neilson's Hardware--the source of burn permits--told us, however, that they could not sell us a recreational burn permit and for such use we would need to go directly to the fire department which is, of course, not open today and thus unable to sanction such frivolity.  So, what to do?

I poked around on the net, thinking that there surely must be some kind of exception for marshmallow cooking, but discovered, sadly, that not only do I need a recreational burn permit to toast a marshallow on a stick, but I need one that is good for an entire year and I need to pay $20 for it.  This makes no sense.

However, the next time regular burn permits are available ($5, available any day from Neilson's), I plan to end the yard refuse burn with a lot of marshmallow toasting.  We'll either just eat them all up then, or freeze them for subsequent use.  Or maybe we'll just toast the marshmallows over the grill. 

Really, somebody needs to rethink this.  I'm beginning to think that I will have to go to the Fire Department open house tomorrow, if only to whine a bit.

Good Work, Canada! I Think, I Hope

Update:  This change goes into effect on July 23.  

Canada, apparently recognizing that the border waiting times at the Point Roberts crossing are getting quite problematic, has reached out to address the problem by extending the Nexus hours from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.  That's a big gain for those of us with Nexus cards, which we residents mostly have.  The problems over the past few months on the Canadian side of the crossing have been that the non-Nexus lines are really long.  I'm hoping that they realized that those lines were lengthened because there were so many Nexus holders in them and that, by extending the Nexus hours, the cars in the regular lane would also benefit.  Otherwise, the long lines on the Canadian side will continue, but the Nexus cardholders will get to sail [sale] on through.

Now, it is the Americans' turn to extend those Nexus hours at the Point Roberts border crossing.  Go, team!

Selling to Each Other

The second Farmers' Market arrived at the Community Center on Saturday morning.  There were several people with actual farmer-like products, including lettuces, kale, and other green edibles, as well as flowers of several sorts.  And plants that would provide edibles at some time in the future, as well as a representative selection of local crafts and jams and the like.  But beyond that, it was more of a flea market in which we all sell, at small prices, our odds and ends back and forth to one another.

It works fine as a small Saturday outing and visit with neighbors and acquaintances, and there's no reason to want it to be something more than this.  It interested me that the people who were selling were, for the most part, different from the ones who were there last time.  Perhaps each market will bring us a different selection of goods and of plants and of foods and of people. 

The first Farmers' Market, two weeks ago, included live music and the Fire Dept. with a presentation on bicycle safety.  That kind of thing was missing this time.  But it was a fun stop on our Saturday trip around Point Roberts: the post office, the market, the hardware store, the llama, and back home.

Make a Joyful Noise!

What I might hope is the last post on the noise problem.

While pursuing the inner calmness and detachment described by the Stoics and by Seneca in particular, I found it necessary to make some noise of my own.  The tall grasses were beginning to be a problem and the string trimmer seemed the perfect tool now that the grasses were pretty dry.  Last month I couldn't find it when I tried to use it.  I've had it for a year or more, but have only used it once, during which experience I discovered that you have to hold it up.  Somehow, I had thought it would be more like using a vacuum cleaner.  This month, when I went to look for it again, there it was, in the shed, hanging right on the wall.  Previously, I hadn't found it because I thought it was in the shed in its box.  Frequently, I find, performing the same act and expecting a different result does not result in schizophrenia but in a different result.

So, the string trimmer in hand and the headphones on my ears, I went out and trimmed for a half hour or so.  What impressed me was how the headphones made it sound, to me, as if I were making almost no noise at all: a gentle buzzing sound, at worst.  Who could object to this sound, even if it were being made at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning?  My second realization is that headphones are the answer to the dog noise.  I can wear them when I'm in the quilting workshop (where I most directly face the dog noise).  I never have worn them there because I'm usually there alone and just listen to music directly.  But I can wear earphones and it will mightily reduce the dog bark sound.  And I will just assume that the dogs' owner similarly goes about his life with earphones on and thinks, as a result, that his dogs sound like bees.

The Quiet Country Life

I spent most of the day yesterday in my quilt workshop working on this quilt piece which is now finished.  The activity conjures up such a pretty picture, I think: the quilter working calmly and purposefully with her needle and thread, hour after hour on a quiet, country, summer afternoon, to produce a homely item that she or he or child or friend can toss over him/herself on a cool fall afternoon while lying on the couch lookiing out the window at the fall leaves or reading a much-beloved 19th Century novel.  (I'm not sure there are any 'much beloved' 20th Century novels, other than among the genre of children's books.)  The quilt surely will be filled with that calmness and steadiness.

So pretty to think of it so.  But in fact, by choosing to spend so much time in my workshop yesterday, I was giving myself the opportunity not only to get this quilt finished, but also the opportunity to listen to my neighbors' workpeople attach a new roof to their house.  Well, it's noisy, but it's a limited time issue, and it has to be done, and better to do it (I guess) in the sun than in the rain, although the temperature in this sun on a roof must be highly debilitating or at least dehydrating.  So that's all right.  But accompanying the hammers were the steady barks of the neighbor dogs.  Were I to walk out on my porch, absolute barking hysteria erupted.  Were anyone to come by, or to walk by, or to bike by, all the same.  And after a spell of barking, the dogs are joined by their owner, who yells into the summer afternoon at them to stop, which they do not.

Eventually, they go inside and quiet returns, but by then, I have left the workshop and am somewhere where I can't hear them quite as well anyway.  But there you have it, a quilt made not with quiet and calmness, but one that includes, at least in the final hours, constant noise from without and irateness from within.  Somehow, I think that calling the law to report excessive barking of dogs is not going to turn out well if the law is the owner of the dogs.  I'm thinking of investing in a voice activated recorder.  Then I will make a 24-hour recording of one of those days when the dogs go at it unrelentingly.  Then I will submit it to a notary to document its authenticity.  And then I will send the tapes anonymously with the notary's sealed paper to the higher law.  Or maybe it's time to deal with a journalist who has a shield for the anonymous source.  Nudge, nudge; wink, wink.

Or maybe not.  This afternoon, I am reading Alain De Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy, and, as it happens, after lunch I started on his chapter on the Stoics.  This is Seneca's advice, via De Botton, about being in the vicinity of excessive noise: "To calm us down in noisy streets, we should trust that those making a noise know nothing of us. . . .  We should not import into scenarios where they don't belong pessimistic interpretations of others' motives.  Thereafter, noise will never be pleasant, but it will not have to make us furious." (Ital. added)  Well, I didn't think that the dogs' owner was tolerating the noise in order to drive me crazy, but rather was tolerating the noise because he didn't care whether I was driven crazy or because he didn't notice that it was a crazy-making noise.  However, I recognized Seneca's advice as well advised: "All outdoors may be bedlam, provided that there is no disturbance within."  So, I hope the guy will work with his dogs to quiet them down, and in the meanwhile, I'll work with my within to reduce disturbance.