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 »
When you live in an old country house, you have to come to terms with dealing with wildlife of many sorts. One of the most common is the tiny mouse who is scurrying this time of year to find a warm place for a winter nest.
So I wasn’t totally unprepared to open the door this morning to see what the dog was barking at, to find a wee mousie cowering in the corner of the deck against the door jamb. Read the rest of this entry »
For all of my pre-country life (50 years), I lived in homes heated by natural gas. It was just as the ads say: clean, easy & relatively inexpensive. The gas supplier also sold the furnaces & provided maintenance service. We never gave heating a second thought, really.
When we moved here, we had a rude awakening. Read the rest of this entry »
Hurricane Bill is barreling up the Atlantic coastline and due to brush Nova Scotia tomorrow. It is, of course, the talk of the town.
The year we moved here (2003) was the first year in a very long time that Nova Scotia had been affected by a hurricane to any extent. But that September, Hurricane Juan 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 »
Hilary Clinton’s now-famous quote — “I believe in a zone of privacy” — made at a press conference to promote her 2003 memoir, Living History, referred to the media’s exposure of public figures.
But in the country, privacy is about your neighbors. Our nearest visible neighbor is across a field about 150 yards from our house. 
We lost a couple of trees in Hurricane Juan (2004) and 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 »
For the rest of my week, see my blog at the Grace in Small Things site.
1. A great musical & drama revue.
2. Featuring local talent.
3. Mounted in the village fire hall.
4. For $10 admission.
5. Plastic bins for sorting.
Wage a battle against embitterment and take part in Grace in Small Things .
[tags]village fire hall, North Shore Revue[tags]
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 »
In the cities of the northern hemisphere, early April’s milder weather often brings an end to wearing boots – especially for adults who won’t be playing in the mud.
I remember that I couldn’t wait to get out of winter footwear & place my daintily shod feet in new spring shoes directly on dry pavement. Or wet pavement, for that matter. It hardly made a difference unless there was snow – and it was actually accumulating. Oh, I suppose there might be a few who still actually wear town boots
with the stiletto heel & fine leather uppers.
Spring footwear in the country, though, is a different game altogether. Read the rest of this entry »
Last night we were storm-stayed again–for the third time this month. Isn’t that a charming term? We’re made to stay inside by the storm.
In actual fact, all the doors are snowed in at least knee high and the path to the car is drifted to my chest. (If, indeed, the car is out there – we can’t see any sign of it anymore.) So storm-stayed we are.
All of our friends in urban, commerce-driven Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday I left you with the cliffhanger of where we go for our coffee fix, as Canadians with no Tim Hortons coffee shop anywhere nearby.
If we’re on the go, the Needs convenience store has carafes of several kinds of coffee on tap all day. We’ve adopted the local favourite of half coffee and half cappuccino as our usual cold weather drink.
If the situation calls for some sit-down time, Read the rest of this entry »
We moved to the country from a large Canadian city, which statement to any Canadian means we had ample opportunity to get coffee and doughnuts from Tim Hortons*. 
So common are these shops, that I’ve even heard a large double-double & a dutchie from Tim’s called the Order of Canada. (In actuality, it’s a large coffee with double cream & double sugar, along with a large doughnut (without the hole) with raisins.)
That the city we moved from was Hamilton, Ontario is a double whammy. Every Hamiltonian knows Read the rest of this entry »
