The forecast isn’t for sunny today, but it’s (way!!) above zero – 15C, 60F – so I’m hanging out at least one load of laundry on the line.

Today is National Hanging Out Day, an initiative of Project Laundry List to promote cheap, low-tech, and easy to install solar clothes dryers – that is, hanging out laundry to dry.

As I’ve discussed on this blog before, in urban & suburban areas, clotheslines can be considered eyesores and are often banned.

In many rural areas, though, hanging clothes is regarded as an art form of sorts. At the very least, it’s just the way things are done: it saves energy (and therefore money) and the clothes smell terrific and last longer.

Clotheslines are definitely part of country living. Whether you participate or not, chances are you’ll be looking at your neighbours’ lines.

Postscript: According to Project Laundry List, the average American uses more energy running a clothes dryer than the average African uses in a year for all her energy needs. Is this fair to the planet?! Yikes, don’t get me started on The Story of Stuff.

My news update e-mail from The Globe & Mail newspaper landed in my e-mail box this morning with an invitation to “Watch more than 300 videos in the Globe Life how-to library“. Thinking I might find some tips on shocking the well water or even wood heat, I clicked through.

Hmmmmm…categories are Fitness, Chef, Wine & Spirits, Beauty, Hair & Fashion. If I want to know how to pair wine with take-out meals or what three coats every woman should have (definitely need that bejeweled evening number to wear to the fracking meeting), I’m set.

But since there is no take-out within 30 miles except chicken balls or donairs not worth wine, and an appropriate “investment” coat for the country is more likely to a ski jacket to be hung on a rack than a camel hair trench, I’m feeling a little out of the loop.

Not enough to move back to the city, mind. Just a little.

Business isn’t so brisk at some old country service stations, so we had to slow down and get a look at the “mechanic” here, especially since the taillights had been on the previous evening.

Incidentally, look at the hills in the background. We’re in the Cobequid Hills, part of the Read the rest of this entry »

Okay you city gals. You ran some errands at lunch today.

Me too: picked up a sandwich, signed for a registered letter, paid some library fines. Remembered to drop off dry-cleaning, pick up eggs, and return a movie. Drove by this.

I never promised you the country was classy.

Technorati Tags: pumpkins, decorating with pumpkins, butt cheeks

Sometimes I wonder how I can have read so many books in my lifetime and never have heard of some authors that apparently have quite a following.

One of those authors is Miss Read, the pen name of Dora Jessie Saint, an English novelist, by profession a schoolmistress who began writing for several journals after World War II and eventually produced a series of novels from 1955 to 1996. In 1940 she married her now late husband, Douglas, a former headmaster. Read the rest of this entry »

For the rest of my week, see my blog at the Grace in Small Things site.

1. Clean sheets

2. Two paying gigs in two nights!

3. The Fabled Pig ham sandwich

4. Sent home on glass plates

5. That we’re trusted to return.

Wage a battle against embitterment and take part in Grace in Small Things .

[tags]grace in small things, Fables Club, Fabled pig[tags]

The front page of the daily paper in our nearest town carried this picture last Thursday morning. The picture is in color and measures 7½” x 9″.
As you can imagine, it WAS the front page story. Page 3 continued with the headline: “Tatamagouche sunflower thief has business owners up in arms” over a smaller b&w photo of one such owner displaying the holes in her flower arrangement.

Six years ago, Read the rest of this entry »

John Payzant was born in Halifax Nova Scotia on Canada’s Atlantic coast. But, like so many Atlantic Canadians, he spent most of his working life in Toronto Ontario as an investment dealer on Bay Street, considered to be Canada’s version of Wall Street.

In 2004, he decided to trade in city life and move to the small town of Lunenburg near his birth city. Lunenburg’s historic waterfront is also on the Atlantic.

Since his city friends thought Read the rest of this entry »

Part of rural living, especially in more remote areas, is the simplification of your approach to life. Living so close to the natural world–hanging out clothes on the line, growing your own vegetables, watching the deer in the fields–makes you aware of things that are not real.

Take toys, for example. Read the rest of this entry »

I missed National Hang Out Day this year (April 19th) because I was sick. No, I wouldn’t have been hanging out with my girlfriends or hanging around the local mall.

National Hang Out Day is an effort supported by Project Laundry List to promote cheap, low-tech, easy to install solar dryers – that is, hanging out laundry to line dry.

You may not like the idea of seeing your neighbors’ undies flapping in the breeze. Read the rest of this entry »