Cleaning Out

Last week my friend Sally and I challenged each other to The Big Clean Out. We were tossing back the iced coffee, talking about this and that when we came upon the subject of clothes. One thing we apparently have in common is a wardrobe full of clothes we don't wear for various and assorted reasons. We have a handful of things we wear, get washed and still somehow get buried and crinkled under the piles of things we are hanging on to that no longer fit or have lost their shape. We are hanging on for sentimental reasons, for frugal reasons or for unknown reasons, but hanging on we are. So we dared each other to get rid of about half of our cupboards and drawers. These last few days it's been lurking in the back of my mind, I've been mentally sorting what to toss and what to keep. I don't know if that exercise made it easier today when I actually hit the cupboard but I knew when I went in I would be ruthless. When the dust settled I had a double pile on the bed that kept falling over:

There are my feet for perspective on how high the piles were. I filled an orange garden trash bag and immediately threw it in the car and hauled it off to Renaissance, the clothes recycler. And now my half empty shelves:

Those feet keep wanting exposure, it must be the spicy red polish they got while trying to put off the sorting.

Metaphorically, this clean out was necessary for me to make space for what I am inviting into my life. All the dreams and hopes and excitement I started the year off with seem to have been put on hold. I just can't seem to get lift-off with any of it. Today I consciously made some room in my life for change and I'm crossing my fingers that what does blow in on the wind to fill those corners will bring me some long awaited joy.

Earth Day

Today is Earth Day. Can we do a little something extra to take care of our earth? I try to live everyday as earth day, without trying to sound too pompous. But this was something I have wanted to write about for almost a month now. I have written a few posts about my composter. The supposedly squirrel-proof tumble-design backyard composter that my rather hardy squirrels decimated. Well, they decimated the trap door that is essential to its proper function. I recently wrote how the company, Envirocycle Systems sold me a replacement door for around $20. A bargain I thought. It shipped to me pretty quickly but I was dinged at my front door by UPS for an additional $23.24 in customs and duties. A bit of an insult since the door was originally made in Canada but had to be shipped from the United States. Mike, the very attentive and friendly guy who works for Envirocycle Systems, came running to my rescue once again. The story goes that his company paid UPS in advance for customs and duties so that I wouldn't have to pay at my door. So boo on UPS for double-dipping and yay for Envirocycle Systems who sent me this cheque to reimburse me for the extra I paid out to UPS.

I like to champion companies who go the extra mile for their customers. My mind boggles that UPS tried to get away with billing twice for customs and duties and that with business practices like that they stay in business. It is not the first issue I have had with UPS and probably won't be the last. But three cheers for Envirocycle Systems!

Unwell

I am unwell. It started yesterday at work. At first it was a suspicious thought - uh oh, am I? I think I am... And an hour later it was - yup, definitely, I am. So I trotted downstairs to the pharmacy and bought a bottle of Cold FX. I am currently in the accelerated phase of this virus where I feel like absolute crap, throat on fire, achey, murky eyes, slight nausea, able to sleep if I even think about lying down. Which all makes sense because earlier this week I came down off a pretty stressful situation in which I had to let something important go. So I might disappear for a couple of days. Or a miracle might happen and I'll be back on top of my world tomorrow.

Success

After sweating about it and planning it for the last couple of weeks, Riley's Easter treasure hunt was a hit. From the moment he got up, saw his basket with the lifesaver gummies and the rabbit footprint we were up and running. It only took half an hour and he had followed all the clues and found the booty. The treasure hunt was a great idea, not that I can really take personal credit for it since I'm sure half of the free world, and maybe half of the not-free world, were doing the same thing. But it provided a focus. As an only child he doesn't have the excitement of competition from siblings to coax him on to find all the hidden eggs. But you know, it could have gone either way. I'm realizing that as much as I think I know my son, there is so much I don't know about him. And that is my own challenge, the learning - and my reward is seeing him truly happy and allowing magic into his life. Here he is somewhere around clue number 3:


And again around clue number 5:


Not to mention the eggs hidden in the bathtub:


And true success on his part:


Later in the morning we went to the Biosphere, which is the former American pavilion from our Expo 67. I was seven years old when Montreal hosted Expo and I remember a lot of it. Since we lived in the city, we had "passports" to the site for the whole summer, I can even remember the black turtle neck sweater I was wearing in the photo on that passport, so I even remember the original American pavilion. For anyone who is not that familiar with my city, it is one of Bucky Fuller's geodesic domes, an immense structure that seems very space age, (think Epcot in Disney) certainly for 1967. And now it has been converted into an interactive ecological site. The first section was the most fun for the kids - all about water. We are quite spoiled here being able to turn on our taps for a seemingly endless supply of cheap water. One of the things that Riley did was a kind of "chop wood and carry water". They had hand pumps at one end of the room and jugs which you would fill, quite slowly, and then you had to carry the full jug across the room and dump in into an old claw-foot bathtub, trying to fill it. Equally slowly. The concept is to see how long it takes to make the water that we soak in every night.

And another shot of Riley walking on pontoons, which of course meant his feet were soaked within the first five minutes:


Amongst other things there was a climbing wall made out of something recyclable (just what escapes my memory at the moment):

And to finish the day, they had an amazing outdoor play park which had very unusual structures - things that use centrifugal force for spinning (lots of those, I almost tossed my lunch a few times), here's just a sweet shot, and you can see it was cold today - we have hats and mitts on again, I believe it was -7 with the windchill: