Hump Day

Wednesday is usually Hump Day at Suzuki institutes, the day many people feel a little tired and drawn. Since we had a humongous Family Dance and Ice Cream Social last night which dragged on until dark, there was an extra reason for everyone to be tired. But most of the kids were still riding high today. Mine certainly were energized.

Fiona is loving her master classes. She's working on left hand dexterity and relaxing her left thumb. Her recital performance of "Two Grenadiers" was a huge crowd-pleaser yesterday. She's in just slightly over her head in "Violin Orchestra" where most of the other kids are over 10, many with sight-reading experience on other instruments, but the more beginnerish reading group wouldn't schedule for her because being in Book 3 she has a group class conflict. But she's so quick to pick stuff up by ear that she quickly catches on and she's not feeling unduly frustrated. In group class she's dwarfed by the teens, but she stays pretty well on-task and is enjoying herself.

Sophie did a confident solo at recital yesterday too with big tone and nice open bowing. Her master class has missed the mark a little; she's a bit of a tough nut to crack, this kid, as she gets more and more inhibited in her playing the more she thinks and the more she's talked to. She needs more of a slappin' about kind of encouragement ("sorry, not enough, give me more... no -- more ... no, twice as much ... getting there, now double it again!") rather than the gentle cautious stroking that her size and body language suggest she needs. She's a tough kid and she'll open up but only if she's ordered to, but you'd never guess that to look at her. Anyway, she does seem comfortable and motivated by the week. She's really enjoying orchestra and the Csardas she's doing in violin ensemble and is opening up her playing there.

Noah is riding high in all his classes. He's in the most advanced quartet (with Erin) and is doing fabulously. Master class is going well. Teachers always like working with Noah; he's quiet, sensitive and extremely musical, and responds very well to suggestions. He's enjoying orchestra, quartet and violin/viola ensemble and getting lots of just the right sort of challenge.

Erin is not getting much musical challenge, but is getting a good helping of time with her two closest friends and a fair bit of opportunity for leadership. Together with some of the faculty she a her friends have also engineered a 'special feature' ensemble, working up a rollicking Czech folk song featuring keyboard, percussion, accordion, voice and strings. Six faculty, four senior students, lots of foot-stomping energy!

While our institute is too small to offer lots of added value for advanced kids, we do allow and even encourage this sort of boundary-crossing, with senior students hanging out with and jamming with faculty. Erin and Noah and four of the other senior kids played in the faculty orchestra at tonight's "Tutti Night" event, for instance. They also took on the pseudo-faculty role of leading groups of violinists in some of the concerto movements they played. Good stuff.

So as we slide down the other side of Hump Day there's lots of good stuff happening. We're already dreading the end of the week.

A stringy week

This is how full my hard drive is. The pink bit is all that's left for my poor Windows XP to work with. Things are slow as molasses here and I certainly can't put new things on my computer right now. You'll have to be patient if I don't upload a lot of photos or videos just now. There's a bottleneck in the data flow. A new secondary hard drive is on the way. When that arrives my iPod will no longer have more memory than my desktop computer.


Today at the Suzuki Institute my elder two kids performed on solo recitals. They both blew me away. Noah's Bach Allemande was so sensitive and clean, musical and unrestrained, but yet still rhythmic and flowing. Erin's Bloch was a technical wonder full of power and passion. I did manage to squeeze a low-res still shot off the video camera. Somehow a tie-dye T-shirt doesn't fit with "an improvisational scene from Hasidic life," but you can trust me that the music fit the mood the composer had intended.

Once my hard drive arrives and the institute wraps up I'll have time to upload proper photos and videos. I'm taking them -- they'll just have to reside on tape and memory cards for a little while yet.

String games have taken the institute by storm. Cat's cradle and a zillion more. We have two faculty members who are experts, one of whom is teaching the kids tricks as part of their movement/folk-dance class and the other who is sharing freely of her expertise outside of class time. The stuff has caught on like wildfire and the faculty seem as caught up in it as anyone else.

Here's a typical scene from the lobby area ... kids eagerly watching, learning, sharing, waiting a turn with Marian, string loops in hand. They delightedly tried out string tricks on each other, on their parents, and on other faculty members.

There was a brief polite reminder necessary before the recital started today ... "strings in pockets, please." I love it when something this simple catches on like this, especially when it crosses generational boundaries and brings assorted dyads and triads of people together for fun and eager learning.

This year's shirts...

.... are red! We had only a few choices of made-in-Canada blanks because we needed something with matching colours in toddler, youth and adult sizes. The red seems to be a hit with most people. We wonder what colour-coded near-disaster will befall us this year. I thought it might be an armed insurrection, or a traumatic amputation. One of our cello teachers wondered about a communist revolution. I encouraged him to get busy starting one, but he had to go out to dinner.

That's Erin saying hello to her friend N., who also did the Edmonton-Montreal program, and who just blew in from Calgary. They've been apart for five whole days. Life's good again.

Community work crew

Today is Set-Up Day for our local Suzuki Institute. My kids are so excited to be heading into their intensive music weeks on home turf, they are thrilled to be part of the set-up crew. We got to the school this morning to move a piano and help with organizing things there only to discover that my compulsive mom and her compulsive sidekick had organized the stink out of the place already. We moved some chairs and stools, set up the T-shirts, put up signs and then it really was done. We had spent only an hour at it. It didn't seem enough. We were still raring to go.

The performance venue, recently renovated, still needed to be set up. Mysteriously one of the other members of the set-up crew had been warning my compulsively over-prepared mom away, telling her she shouldn't really go and see the venue yet. My kids and I headed over to see what we could do to help set up. The village has been adding a set of washrooms at the back, renovating store-rooms, preparing to move in a whole new set of interior equipment -- staging, chairs, etc.. It was definitely still a construction zone when we arrived. There was dirt, mud and drywall dust everywhere. Everywhere. The electrician was there with his huge heaps of tools and supplies, the bathrooms weren't finished, a volunteer brigade of locals was there pulling apart the temporary staging, trying to clean up bats of rotting fibreglass insulation, unpacking chairs and portable staging, risers, music stands. Keep in mind that the opening performance for our Suzuki Institute is tomorrow afternoon!

Well, we set to work. The kids worked really hard. They tore sticky labels off 250 brand new chairs and moved them down from the balcony two at a time. They used tools and instructions to assemble all the music stands. They swept and mopped and swept and mopped. The cleared a storage room, moved scores of wooden chairs upstairs and surplus new chairs into storage. They assembled the staging, they set up 200 audience chairs, pushed the concert grand around, swabbed railings and finials, hand-washed stairs, washed and moved tables, took down outdated signage, hauled dollies around, packed construction debris out. It took about 3 1/2 hours, and we didn't do it all ourselves by any stretch, but the transformation was amazing and the kids were a huge part of it. In that short space of time the venue went from a construction zone to a spankingly improved community hall looking its best. A good day's work.

Aikido camp report

Sophie attended the full sleep-away Aikido camp. She was eager from the first mention of the program early last spring. Noah attended as a day camper for one day, at my encouragement. Both kids enjoyed themselves immensely. And I've been so impressed with their experience ... I have to rave. Yet another stunning little secret resource in our valley. I can't believe the whole world isn't trying to move here. We have the best little multi-age intergenerational string orchestra, a dynamite student violin ensemble, a crystal clear lake with wilderness shores, mountains and glaciers all around, artistic vibrancy, community self-reliance, open-mindedness ... I'll stop now.

Back to Aikido camp. The facility is a 1600 sq.ft. strawbale dojo with living quarters of similar dimensions above. Off-grid with solar electric. The family that owns the facility lives there most of the year, but they've built the living quarters to serve as a retreat centre too, so there are bunk bedrooms that will sleep 24 and a huge open kitchen / great room with Japanese-style seating.

At camp the kids had an Aikido class to start each morning and wrap up each day's activities. Meals were vegetarian and 100% organic. The garden and the bush provided opportunities for foraging for fresh food. There was loads of creative play in the forest. The kids created and performed a play, entirely of their own volition. They journaled, drew and sketched each day. They took photos of their activities and put them together as a slide show. They cared for the dojo and the living facilities. They had mentors come to teach them about water sample testing and riparian restoration, to introduce them to aquatic insects, nematodes and micro-organisms. An art teacher took them outdoors to sketch, paint and draw. From a local naturalist they learned to identify wildflowers and herbs, and their nutritional and medicinal uses. They hiked up Mt. Gimli. They went kayaking. And they enjoyed each other's company, creativity and energy.

And all of it was carried off within an atmosphere of trust and respect for the children. Did I mention that the dojo parents are homeschooling? Though we'd never discussed our educational philosophies, after seeing them in action over the months I wasn't surprised to discover that their 8-year-old daughter is unschooled.

I have strawbale envy, though. A bad case. A music studio is taking shape in my mind.

New Book 3

The Revised Edition of Suzuki Violin Book 3 came out a couple of months ago. I like it. The pieces are all the same but the revision fixes a couple of wrong notes and introduces some new bowings and fingering alternatives. It also includes more printed supplementary exercises and guidance. The recording it comes with is nice.

I've been using it with Fiona. I figure she's my last child through this repertoire and my best chance to really delve into the changes and internalize them. Well, let me tell you, it's not easy for me to undo 30-plus years of habits. I think I've pretty much got Bach Gavotte in D down with its extra trills and re-arranged slurs (I've always taught Gavotte I with the up-bow start, so that's easy). I've nailed the note-corrections in Bach Bourrée but the bowings are still a work in progress. Old dog, new tricks and all that.

The added wrinkle is that Fiona has heard the piece all her life with the other bowings, so she isn't learning the revised bowings as easily as she normally learns bowings. While we've ramped up the listening in the last month, she's heard these pieces differently for more than five years.

All of which has led us, for the first time ever, to put the music up on the stand as a reference. I put it up because I needed it, but she was thrilled to discover that she could read along as she played and read the bowings off the page too. Those glasses are sure making a difference! We're only using the printed music for selected lines in Bach Bourrée; I can't see her becoming reliant on it. But she's feeling very empowered to have the ability to put written and aural music together in her head and in her fingers.

Travels with Noah

Noah had the option of going to Aikido camp with Sophie for four days while I whizzed to Edmonton to pick up Erin, but he chose to do a day of camp instead and then come with me on the long drive. "I like travelling," he said. He certainly copes incredibly well with it. Does he like it? In some ways, I guess. I brought the camera for him. He made liberal use of it, at times. Like the engineer that he is, he spent a fair bit of time trying to figure out how the auto-focus algorithm works. Taking pictures of mirrors, through glass, of moving vs. stationary objects, large vs. small, central vs. peripheral, trying to figure out exactly what it was that told the camera "focus here."


Because we were meeting Erin's plane in Edmonton before heading to Calgary we took the alternate-route option and drove part of the way on the Icefields Parkway through Jasper Provincial Park. The last time I drove it was 2001, when Noah was a preschooler and we were on our way back from the Yukon. (Reminder to self: merge the Yukon travelblog with current blog before the former gets deleted from cyberspace.) We loved the vermilion lakes that are so plentiful in this part of the country.


I really love having Noah along. He tolerates, even shares, my weird obsessions with various music. Most lately ... Les Violons du Roy: Piazzolla and Mike Ford: Canada Needs You. (Thanks, Karen, for turning us on to the latter!) The former is sizzling Argentinian music arranged for string orchestra by a contemporary Russian composer, the latter a edifying, entertaining and humorous album of Canadian history music recorded in a variety of music styles with brilliant songwriting and production.

Not only that, but he plays along with Fiona. They tickle each other, they make fun of each other, they joke, they play games, the talk ... all of which means I have considerable assistance in providing entertainment for my firecracker of a 5-year-old. They played "I'm Thinkin' of a Number" for at least two hours. Fiona got really handy with negative numbers and deciding if -100 was "too big" or "too small" a guess for -14. I listened to Noah trying to stump Fiona with 'negative pi.' He's a great coach and explainer. She's a good sport and so is he.


There were big Rocky Mountains as usual, but they were different ones from those we normally see. The glaciers were more visible and more impressive along this stretch of highway. There were bright blue lakes rather than bright blue churning rivers.


We loved the too-blue-for-words lakes, and an hour later the too-yellow-for-words canola fields.

And there were oil wells. I tried to convince Noah and Fiona that canola oil comes from the roots of the plant, and is extracted underground by huge pumps which create negative pressure beneath fields of yellow.


They did not buy this explanation for a minute. They did, however, enjoy seeing the oil wells pumping away. As we burned gosh-knows-how-much gasoline. I don't even want to think about that.


They crashed in a crappy motel and on someone's basement floor, and ate fruit,m and Tim Horton's everything-bagels with herb&garlic cream cheese and life was just fine. Keep the Argentinian Tangos rolling and we'll be home in no time.

Look who's home!

I love this kid. I missed this kid while she was gone for almost 3 weeks, even though her younger sister referred to her as nothing more than a "couch prop." Lovingly so, but still... Anyway, she had fun. She misses all her friends from the program and all the excitement and the busyness. She's also glad to be home. We're glad to have her. There's a lot of laughing going on here tonight.

Some things were easy for her. Some things were hard. It was all worthwhile.

She did 86 hours of music over the two-and-a-bit weeks. Performed in something like 10 concerts.

More impressive still is the untallied but challenging roughly equal number of hours of large-group and small-group semi-organized socializing with scarcely a moment of down-time.

Somebody took a beautiful photo of her which I'm so happy to have.

Four days until our own local music programs start. No forest fires yet.

At Grandma's again

This morning I took Sophie off to a four-day sleep-away Aikido Camp. Two and a half weeks ago I dropped Erin off in Calgary for her music programs in Alberta and Quebec. And Fiona had decided it was time for a second sleepover at Grandma's.

Between the time I dropped Sophie off (9:00 a.m.) and picked Fiona up (9:40 a.m.), I had only one child living at home. Noah was still in bed, of course, so he didn't notice he was sisterless. But still, it was rather amazing. Each of my girls had managed to find the exact right size of the away-from-home adventure that suited her.

Fiona's first sleepover at her Grandma's was what prompted the purchase of the lovely Hanna Andersson backpack she's sporting above (they're on sale again as I type). It fit all her essentials, including her newly-purchased iPod nano and all her books and clothes. As usual she packed herself and did a great job. She's carrying Blokus, a family game that she really enjoys. It was a very successful adventure.

Alphabetization Brainsmash

We came up with a new game in the van a couple of weeks ago. Sophie and Noah and I played for some time. I'm not sure I should really play while driving, as it consumes a fair bit of my mental acuity. But whatever.

It starts out with the Chooser saying "I'm thinking of a word..."

And it can be any word that you might find in a dictionary. The Guessers then suggest a possible word. "Marmot?" someone might ask.

"Too early," the Chooser says, meaning it's too early in the dictionary.

"Vegetable?"

"Too late."

And so it goes. Until we gradually get down to third and fourth-order alphabetizations.

"Sin?"

"Too late."

"Similar?"

"Too early."

"Simple?"

"Too early."

"Ack! What's an S-I-M word that has a fourth letter later than P?" says one Guesser.

"Well," reminds another Guesser, "it could be S-I-M-P, but just be later than the L. Like SimPro or something, if that was a word. But it's not. That sounds like an upgrade for The SIMS2."

My hypothetical word was 'simpleton,' which is of course not 'later than the L' but it is later than 'simple.' So you can see this starts getting very mind-bending. Especially if you're doing it all orally, without putting anything in writing.

Part of my heart is in Montreal

Erin is in Montréal right now. She flew out of Edmonton the other day, after 10 days away from home, and arrived without incident with her exchange group. She was picked up by a family who are billeting her in Quebec. She called home to say she'd arrived safely -- tired but happy and fine.

It's supposed to be hard, this letting-go thing. It feels big I guess, but it hasn't really been difficult. Why? Because I think I am as excited as she is about her new, growing independence and her ability to cope with things I'd never have dreamt would come this quickly to her. I am so proud of what she's doing, of who she is becoming. And that parental pride is making it all feel fine.

I'm sure it's a bit of a stretch for her, being off on her own, having to cope with her own needs and the inevitable organizational glitches, having to approach people she's barely met and ask questions or make requests. But I know she will cope, I am confident that even if there are moments of stress and hurdles to overcome, she will do fine... and that makes me proud.

Can't wait to have her back, though!

All mucked out

Oh, look at this stuff! It makes me so happy and proud!

Procrastinator that I am, I prefer to just keep adding straw to the chicken coop to keep it relatively fresh. I do one big mucking-out a year.
This was the weekend. Six wheelbarrows-full of the stuff. Amazing rich, half-composted, nitrogen-laden stuff it is, mixed nicely with half-rotted straw. Mixed in with a little bit of grass-clippings it completely filled two of our three compost bays.

For the rest of the summer we'll keep it damp and mostly covered, adding yard waste and food scraps now and then. By next spring it'll be finished and we'll have three or four heaping wheelbarrows of dark amazing compost.

Now -- off to the sun shower!

Fiona's glasses

I was getting my prescription on my glasses adjusted and I figured I'd get Noah's eyes rechecked (he wears glasses for reading if his eyes start to get tired). And while Fiona had never complained of anything, I though it might be a good idea to get her eyes screened. She has been reading language for about two years and music for a good 6 months and does a lovely job with numbers and computers for a five-year-old. So I figured she was unlikely to have any eye problems. She was very excited about her eye appointment. It was going to be an interesting experience, she was sure -- even though she was sure she wouldn't need glasses.

How wrong we all were. You just assume that because you have a precocious kid who doesn't complain that everything must be okay. But from the instant she sat in the big chair and began trying to read off the chart it was apparent that something serious was up. Her vision was at best 20/100 uncorrected. Twenty-twenty is of course "normal," and 20/200 is generally equated with legal blindness. So she was basically half-blind. It turns out she's extremely far-sighted ... more than 7 diopters. With correction her vision will likely be close to normal, though she'll need to be rechecked to confirm that.

This makes sense of a lot of things that in retrospect I'm kicking myself for not putting together. Her tendency to get in front of everyone else in an attempt to see the TV or computer screen. Her inability to cope with the 2nd volume of the "I Can Read Music" book, even though it starts out easier than the first volume, which she can do easily (the second book is in a smaller font). Her ability to read almost any newspaper or magazine headline, but her disinterest in reading anything more than (large-font) easy readers in book form.

I think she looks gorgeous in her new glasses. And she is thrilled with them which is super.

At the market

The younger two girls decided to take their turn busking at the market today. The weather was great and they arrived in good time for the busy part of the market. Sophie started with her "set" and got people's attention. She played for 15 or 20 minutes and took in a lot of cash as people noticed and expressed their appreciation. Then she and Fiona did a set together and that's when the applause began happening. There were even people besides me taking pictures. Donations continued to pour in. Those girls have serious cuteness when they play together!

Finally Fiona finished up with a set on her own. People are always fascinated by her tiny violin and the big 'real' sound that comes out of it. One of the market ladies reminded me that Fiona had begun her busking career three years ago when her siblings were playing together and she was 'playing along' on her cardboard violin, even though she wasn't yet taking lessons. Hard to believe that was three years ago, but then I look at the competent little musician she's become and of course it's been three years.

Sophie brought her cash home to apply to her ledger. Money burns a hole in Fiona's pocket these days, at least if it's the jingly kind that you can run your fingers through, so afterwards she headed straight for Morgen's market stall and bought herself a new Inkyspider T-shirt. Her last Inkyspider shirt had long been a favourite but recently met with some sort of mysterious outdoor mishap. So this was a thrilling and timely purchase from the morning's violin-generated windfall. And hurrah for shopping locally and supporting local artisans.

Branches

Another surprise piece of artwork surfaced at the end of violin lessons at grandma's. Today it was Sophie's creativity that took advantage of the sibling-lesson-time. She had spent ages with a single pencil crayon drawing tree branches. This is a detail of the tree. I love the tangled randomness of the branches and the way there's a clear sense of three-dimensional space in the overlapping of twigs. And yet there's something quite fractal-like in this art too.

The kids used to do some wonderful weekly art classes, until the teacher got too busy with her own art and schooling to offer them any more. Both Sophie and Noah mentioned today how much they miss them.

Contracting out parenting

Dear parent who asking for help finding bike-riding lessons for your 7-year-old:

There's a tendency these days to think that by contracting out what used to be basic childhood learning to 'professionals' who specialize in it we're giving our kids a better experience. Learning to swim, cook, sew, stay home alone, ride a bike, throw and catch a ball, grow a garden, develop empathy, build a go-kart, you name it and there are 'experts' offering classes and parents willing to sign their kids up.

I think this trend is a sad one, because it undermines confidence and interrupts the flow of knowledge through the generations. It undermines both parental confidence ("how can I possibly teach my child to do ____ if it's so complicated that people are paying experts to do it?") and child confidence ("mom and dad don't believe I can learn this without specialized help"). It produces a new generation of people who believe they won't be able to pass these skills onto their own kids, because they were taught by specialists themselves. And also, of course, it contributes to the rat-race of over-scheduled kids and double-income cash-strapped parents, all of which reduces the amount of time parents and kids have to spend together.

So here's my plea -- teach your own kid to ride a bike. I know you've tried. You're not done yet. Keep trying. Draw on the wisdom of other parents rather than the supposed expertise of experts. Trust that he will learn. Trust that you can help him. Spend the time with him. Make it a family event to go off to the schoolyard three evenings a week with daddy in tow so that you have the manpower to help the trike-sibling too. Stop for popsicles on the way home to make a special ritual. Create a memory of "that summer when you learned to ride a two-wheeler -- remember all those popsicles! Wasn't that fun!?" Do it with joy, trust, confidence, pleasure and time together with your child.

Playground behaviour

Recently a discussion on a parenting message board got me thinking about what I've done to equip my kids to deal with mean-spirited behaviour from other kids. You know, the sort of stuff where some young 5-year-old attacks his playmate with classic threats like "if you don't give me that, I won't be your friend" or "oh yeah? well Josh is my best from from now on, not you!"

Having kids who are older now, I wanted to offer some tried-and-true wisdom, but I realized: my kids haven't really ever learned how to deal with mean-spirited kid behaviour. That sort of stuff tends to spring up when levels of adult supervision are low and the number of kids is high. My kids don't go to school and don't end up in a lot of situations where the adult to child ratio is less than 1:4. On the rare occasions where they've witnessed a kid saying "I won't be your friend if you don't ____" they've been stunned. I've usually been a witness too, and we've talked about it as a family, either afterwards or in a quiet corner of the common space. We've talked about how some kids struggle with polite respectful social skills, perhaps because they haven't been taught how to think about others' feelings, and that's kind of been it.

But it's only happened rarely, the group of kids has usually been small, parents usually present and involved, and it hasn't gone very far. In essence my kids have avoided the vast bulk of that sort of thing. It's just how our lives have worked out. We spend time with people we like, and my kids like people who behave respectfully.

So I thought about Noah and Erin, both of whom are sensitive souls, and wondered what they've missed out on by not having to learn to deal with that garbage. How do they cope now? Well, the truth of it is that as they get older, people stop shouting "I'm not inviting you to my birthday party, so there!" as a form of retaliation over a trivial perceived slight. While there are no doubt a few teens and adults who behave almost as childishly, my kids are never going to hang out with them, because they abhor that sort mean-spiritedness.

The bottom line is that childish mean-spiritedness becomes much less prevalent and much easier to avoid when you're no longer 5 years old. So I don't think a bit of avoidance is such a bad thing at all. The schoolyard or the playground aren't really Real Life. They're rough places full of socially inept impulsive little people. Real Life is much easier to deal with in a lot of ways.

First problem bear

The rabbits have a good hutch. Today we had a visit from the first 'problem bear' of the year. We've been extremely fortunate this year to have had only skulking, skittish night-time bear visits, and very few of those. (Evidence via scat only.) This morning Sophie was half way to the rabbit hutch when she saw a large black hulk was, er, already visiting the rabbits.

Sophie got back to the house without the bear being alerted. We went out together through our very squeaky bang-y front door and the bear didn't spook at all. He was having a good look through the rabbit-manure bin, having pulled it out from beneath the hutch. We yelled and he didn't leave. I grabbed the air rifle and started pumping it up. That weird snapping sound didn't spook him at all. He moved towards the chickens, who thankfully hadn't been let out yet. They were hunkering down inside their UPPCC being sensibly very quiet.

I'm thrilled that our animals were safe and unmolested. We seem to have really solved the large-predator problem with our secure animal housing.

The bear was not spooked by pellet zings nearby, but when I nailed him with in the flank he finally took notice. But he didn't dash off -- he just sat down and spent some time inspecting his flank. That's not a reaction I've ever had in the past. Kind of scary how unspookable he was. We yelled some more and he eventually ambled off.

Leaving the nest

Erin is gone. She's been gone for a few days. When she was 11 and 12 she occasionally slept overnight at a friend's house, but really she didn't enjoy that very much and was doing it mostly out of a sense of obligation. Eventually she decided that wasn't enough of a reason. She's been very much a homebody her whole life. Until lately.

Last Thursday morning I said goodbye as she loaded herself into a vehicle in a Calgary parking lot and headed off for almost 3 weeks many hours from home. This week she's in Edmonton. Next week she'll be in Montreal. She was convinced she was ready. I think she must have been right.

She has the cellphone and so far we've been chatting every day or two. Some things have been a bit of a logistical struggle, and sometimes it has helped for her to be able to call me and get a suggestion or two, or just to commiserate. She's in a position of being one of only two students out of 32 who are neither local nor being billeted with locals, the other such student having her mom along for the week, so she's more on her own than the others and sometimes she's slipped through some organizational cracks in the program. Coping with this has a big challenge for a kid who was 11 before she was even able to work up the courage to order for herself in restaurants. But she's doing fine. She's having fun. And working hard! She practiced for 5 hours yesterday, in addition to 5 hours of rehearsals and master classes.

This is a good test run for a kid who is planning to leave the nest to go halfway around the world for two months next winter. I'm so proud of her courage. I know how much courage is required when introverts take on these sorts of things. And yet she's finding herself capable, and finding the rewards to be worth it.

Sun shower

Last summer during the big power outage during the forest fire, we made a low-budget sun shower. We just linked our three garden hoses in series, filled them with water, and let them warm up in the sun. We attached a spray nozzle, tied it to a tree, and, if we timed it right, we could shower in the 5 gallons of hose water without burning our skin off, and before it turned ice cold.

We had owned a proper campers' sun shower pre-kids, and loved it, but it had been stolen years ago. This spring I bought us a replacement. It's a big 6-gallon one and has a thermometer on it which you can watch and decide when is the right time for a shower.

So now there's shampoo and soap on the window ledge by the door, and at about 5 p.m., after a long day of yardwork, the time is right. There's something about being naked outside, in the woods, surrounded by birds and breezes (and curious chickens) that makes a shower many times more refreshing than it would be indoors.

Fiona enjoys the sun shower. She especially enjoys the part afterwards when she runs full-tilt across the lawn flapping a towel cape behind her naked body, yelling "yahoo!"

So far no one has stalked me with the camera, so content yourselves with still life photos.