Birds and Flowers

One lunchtime and a morning to explore Victoria:


* Yellow silk shoes from Helmcken House.

* The BEEHIVE wool shop on Douglas!





* The Irish Linen Store where I resisted all but this William Morris tea towel and a ladies hankie embroidered with tiny blue roses.

more tomorrow ...catching up on weeks of travel and visiting.

Royal British Columbia Museum Collections

Beautiful organisation and storage.

A tour through the conservation labs and collections storage (archives too):
* From the ethnological (Haida) collection: Sea grass baskets and little mats. Beaded gloves and belts in their acid-free nests.
* Hats, wigs and bonnets having mounts made for them. They'll be exhibited come mid-March in a show on the history of the province.
* The fabric samples reference 17th c for i.d. and replicas.

This spurred me to buy a flat file (good luck getting it up here) and finally plan & construct mounts for my bonnet and shoe collections. ...soon.
I'll be taking a mount making course in Illinois in June.

(The walrus diorama was so-so. I'm not hot on the teched-out natural history exhibitions. I love the simple vitrine. But the ice in the woolly mammoth diorama was pretty neat.)

also
thinking of little Magsie.
http://dachshundlove.blogspot.com/2007/11/dachshunds-in-pop-culture-andy-warhol.html

Everyone Says Thank You

in Victoria.

And everywhere you find grass, you find bunnies.

Snowshoeing

...with Chera and Scott, on the ridges of the Yukon River.
Scott's dad made these snowshoes for him 15 years ago.

Morning

In Whitehorse.
Sunny and beautiful today. A breakfast of toast and a walk with Liza.

(Top = Chera and Scott's cabin - a view of the living room and kitchen w/ the ladder up to the bedroom loft on the left).

The Book of Love

Children's Books recently thrifted in Dawson

Anticipation

I leave this Thursday for a week of museology at uvic. Collections!
I'm full of anticipation for this career trajectory. Looking forward to some research at the RBCM (and can't wait to lay eyes on the Northern Sea Lions Diorama).

...followed by long overdue visits with friends on the way and on the coast.
Chera and Sonja in Whitehorse.
Paul Henderson in Victoria.
Jana Razga on the Sunshine Coast.

Paul will be there visiting his dear one, Rosie, who's completing her MA in art history at uvic.
Pawl and I did our undergrad together and lived above Struts Gallery in Sackville, NB one winter while I was artist-in-residence. He runs Faucet Media Arts Centre and Sappy Fest there.
He who makes beautiful things (of which I have not one image to show you) and loves to facilitate all manner of projects for others.
He of the Copper Dog.

Jana and I established a women's radio collective and zine in the early 90's called Adamant Eve. She's been living on the Sunshine Coast since 1997 and just had a little baby boy named Lief.


prrrrrrrretty
flowers
+
fair weather clothes.
(but such sour faces)

Dreaming of peeling the 4 layers of wool off my bod for a bit ...going to the humid, green, flowery land of the west coast.

Bright

I would've liked to post this on Jan. 1 but instead I'm posting it Feb 1 (i mean 2nd... now so late at night).

Thank you to Charles, who knows me.

New Year's Eve

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Published: December 31, 2007 in The New York Times


At midnight tonight, the horses on this farm will age a year. That is the custom — every horse has the same birthday, Jan. 1. Like all things calendrical, this is a human convention. When it comes to equine conventions, I know enough to notice some of the simpler forms of precedence: who goes first through a gate, who gets to the grain feeder ahead of the others. But I can report that the horses make no fuss about their common birthday or the coming of the new year. Tonight, like any other, they will be standing, dozing on their feet, ears tipping back and forth at the slightest of sounds.

There is something deeply gratifying about joining the horses in their pasture a few minutes before the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve. What makes the night exceptional, in their eyes and mine, is my presence among them, not the lapsing of an old year.

It’s worth standing out in the snow just to savor the anticlimax of midnight, just to acknowledge that out of the tens of millions of species on this planet, only one bothers to celebrate not the passing of time, but the way it has chosen to mark the passing of time. I remember the resolutions I made when I was younger. I find myself thinking that one way to describe nature is a realm where resolutions have no meaning.

It’s not that time isn’t passing or that the night doesn’t show it. The stars are wheeling around Polaris, and the sugar maples that frame the pasture are laying down another cellular increment in their annual rings. The geese stir in the poultry yard. A hemlock sheds its snow. No two nights are ever the same.

I always wonder what it would be like to belong to a species — just for a while — that isn’t so busy indexing its life, that lives wholly within the single long strand of its being. I will never have even an idea of what that’s like.

I know because when I stand among the horses tonight, I will feel a change once midnight has come. Some need will have vanished, and I will walk back to the house — lights burning, smoke coming from the wood stove — as if something had been accomplished, some episode closed.

VERLYN KLINKENBORG