Apropos of nothing...

I think I might just quietly revive our neglected little blog. To be honest, I've missed writing this semi-public chronicle of our home renovations (among other things). Because we're acting as our own general contractors and more often general labourers, our renovations are still far from complete. Looking back at the blog, I see that I never did post any photos of our completed bathroom, and now we're in the midst of collecting quotations for kitchen cabinetry, so I'll have much to tell. And maybe, just maybe, there will be someone out there to advise us when we need it. More to come.

Sugar maples glow outside the sunroom windows and scarlet Boston ivy climbs our gray brick walls.

Interstice

Well of course there are REASONS for our long and unannounced trajectory away from the blogosphere.

Somewhere over the Atlantic

We’ve been away, for one, making six virtually unplanned cross-Atlantic flights over two months at the beck of both business and friendship--a little April in Paris, a few strolls along the lake in posh Geneva, a hike along the Polish/Slovakian border in the Pieniny mountains, an evening sipping Prosecco in one of Europe’s most beautiful squares in Krakow, the pleasure of looking at art and architecture, old and new, in and out of the EU, and many unforgettable meals, but also a stomach wrenching plummet into grief at the unexpected loss of a young and accomplished good friend—one of the best people anyone could ever hope to know. Things either so light as to dissipate instantly when I tried to catch them in words, or so leaden that they crushed my thoughts before I could write them. Nothing apropos at all.

One of those world-between-world intersticial airport spaces

I attribute our absence to existential imbalance. Plus inertia.

The YYZ tarmac--home

Now we are back on more solid ground (but not quite so solid floors). So, if you’re still with us, stay tuned for some harrowing renovation tales, lightened with the odd travel memory.

See you in Sep-tem-ber. See you when the summer’s through

A farewell repast on Nova Scotia's gorgeous south shore

Oh, wait, it is September and summer is almost through. I guess we should’ve mentioned our intentions to stray a little earlier. But we’re back now. Did you miss us? We missed you. We were around, most of the time, but the thing is, it was summer; the days were long, and we could pack so much into the daylight hours that by the time it got dark and we were finally sitting down, maybe with a glass of wine to toast the end of the day, we were too overcome with exhaustion to chronicle our modest accomplishments, or even to read our favourite blogs. It’s only now as we’ve returned from our end-of-summer vacation by the sea on Nova Scotia’s south shore, and the skies are beginning to darken before eight and the unmistakable signs of the winding down of summer mount, that we’re beginning to feel the pull back to the blog and the occasional log of our little pursuits.

The challenge in summer is whether to just do the thing or to take the time to document the doing. The doing won out. But some of the things we’ve done really merit a mention, so the next few blog entries will offer some backward glances into our summer adventures at home and away.