Hello again, on this fine Wednesday morning…

I’m sitting here sipping tea, trying to gather the motivation to get something done.

Anything…

I got the girl off to school and now have started the fire so perhaps by bedtime my house might be warm. It’s been a few weeks since my furnace fuel ran out and I’m waiting for the rest of the snow to go and the frozen earth to thaw and re-solidify before I can call the oil company to send a truck. There’s no chance they could get up my hill yet.

As much as it is a modern inconvenience, I’m kind of loving the dependence on wood heat to warm me up. It’s always cold in the morning, but there is an old fashioned charm to it and it makes me feel like I really do live in the country, which I do.

It was pretty lovely last week, sitting out on my deck sipping my coffee in early-summer weather and it really got our hopes up that winter was over. Of course, there is always one more storm (at least) at that point which decided to come yesterday. The landscape is once again white and black with miniscule touches of red where the PEI earth shows through.

Tomorrow I will be heading out of winter directly into the BC spring where it should rain non-stop. This time we are heading out just for a west coast music conference and not playing any proper shows. It’s a long way to travel, from far east to far west, just to play 20 minutes in hopes of future work, but that’s the glamorous ridiculous life I’m leading, I guess.

Perhaps, by the time we get home, spring will have really stuck here in PEI. You just never really know. And upon return, I get to play with one of my local heroes, Mitch Schurman, at the newly re-opened Trailside in Mt Stewart, PE. It’ll be exciting to see how one of my favourite PEI venues has changed under the new ownership of some of Charlottetown’s greatest, young entrepreneurs and music lovers.

Last night I went to bed reading “The Good Life” by Helen and Scott Nearing, the grand-parents of the back-to-the-land movement. They moved out of NYC to Vermont in the 30’s to find a better life, one not based on profit but on time well spent. I devoured the whole chapter on their Vermont gardening techniques in one go and it kept me up for ages before I finally succumbed to sleep. I am so thrilled to start my garden again this year, and we only have to wait for the weather to change. It does (or did) seem like an early spring might be ours this year… early for PEI, I mean. Not Toronto or England or Spain. I am ok with that. Really. Mostly.

Anyway… off I go to work. The fire is kicking in now and my tea cup needs replenishing.

Thanks for the continued support.

Catherine