Are you creative? Are you artistic? Do you have an eye for balancing an image? My friend, the Fundy Migrant, 🙂 is taking a course on photography. I’ve always thought she took great pictures but I do see her skill growing rapidly. I think that supports the credo “Practice Makes Perfect”. Or at least leads to improvement. Those of you who only know her as the Fundy Migrant or “that woman” don’t know of her long history of creativity, but you will learn. My personal favorite, of course, were the Drama Dolls. And my very own special Drama Doll. But I digress (as usual). Because this post isn’t about her but about me (as usual). *grin*
I am very conflicted when I think about my artistic abilities. On the one hand, I think I’m creative. I’ve made and sold my own pottery (for real money to people who didn’t know me).
I think I have a good eye for my gardens. I learned to make virtual trees (thank you Fundy Migrant) and I learned to script so items I created would move. I made virtual hair which people wanted. I bake well also – ask my brother-in-law about my sugar free rugelach. On the other hand, I was NOT considered the artistic member of my family. Museums exhaust me mentally long before physical fatigue sets in. I passed up visiting Florence to go back to spend more time in Rome. You might remember a posting about a picture in our family home – the picture that my mother declared separated those with an artistic eye from those without. I loathed that picture. So you know where I was slotted on the spectrum. 🙂
I have been very slow to renovate my house. The house is nearly 100 years old. We’ve been there 34 years. We still have the original kitchen cabinets, kitchen counter, upstairs carpeting, and upstairs bathroom. For most people of my acquaintance, this is little short of heresy. Almost taboo. We did an addition to the house. We repainted the kitchen and changed the lights, and we’ve done other repairs and such over the years. 
But other than the addition, which we did nearly 30 years ago, I’ve not done anything BIG. Several years ago it was time to repaint the living room and dining room and my big-breakout designer action was to paint the walls something other than WHITE. I used TWO strong colors in the dining room, and the ceiling in the dining room was the same faint pink-overtones of white that were the walls in the living room. I loved it. I remember my mother making “a face” at the end result. I, however, felt vindicated and still love my palette to this day.
Last year about this time we needed a new chandelier for the dining room. While we were at the lighting store, I saw a ceiling fan that captured my heart. It had 5 blades, shaped like fat rubber tree leaves. We bought it and replaced the ceiling fan in the sunroom. I thought no more about it until my niece suggested that I make the sunroom my “beach getaway” room, my own little tropics in NJ. I’d never considered redoing an entire room with a theme. I know OTHER people do these things, but I never considered it. But the suggestion took root, especially when my niece gave me the color palette she thought I’d like. I redid the entire room, piece by piece, idea by idea, slowly but surely. Everything was done except…. except…. I wanted a big seascape above the windows across from my reading chair. 
I didn’t find what I wanted at craft shows or online. I found wallpaper, however, that triggered some ideas. The wall is mostly windows. I wanted something more “ocean, beach” for the little bit of wall that remained. I bought wallpaper that looked like a weathered ocean fence, and a border that was ocean waves, sand dunes with beach grass and blue sky. I told folks that I was going to put the fencing down the wall and across the top of the wall above the windows, then put the border on top of that so it would look like I was looking out over the fence to the ocean. The reactions I received ranged from a slightly skeptical look to “that’s ridiculous, the ocean isn’t ABOVE the windows”. It looks great. I love it. It’s everything I wanted. People who see it love it too (okay, they might be humoring me but I don’t care. *I* LOVE it.)
I’m feeling much more confident about my ability to design a room and pull the various pieces together. I have much more faith in my taste in furnishings and color and concept. That is a very good thing, too. Because in 2 weeks we will gut our entire kitchen, widen a doorway, and redo the kitchen we have had for 34 years. Big changes are coming….
This was it! The last leg of the trans-Canada journey. We were arriving at the Bay of Fundy. We needed to get up early because we had to drive to catch the ferry. Some islands have bridge access, some islands have ferry access, some have both. We needed to take a ferry to get where we were going. I know that I have, at some point in my life, been on a car-carrying ferry but I cannot remember where or when. Maybe I’ve just read a lot of books and think that I’ve been on one. 🙂 As usual, Jamie, Duff and Fergus were really excited about their upcoming first-ferry experience. *grin*
She’d been warned that the house was not in the cleanest of conditions. In any case, she wanted to clean surfaces and such before moving in any of her belongings. Her belongings…. you know, we STILL had no word from the movers. They’d said it would take 7-15 days to get there with all of Honour’s furniture and belongings. We’d made it in 7. We were frantic in case the movers were hot on our trail and might get there before us. There was also the matter of payment. Apparently the deal was payment in cash. 
Neither of us was carrying that much cash. Honour should have been stopping at bank machines all along, withdrawing her daily limit but somehow we never remembered to make that stop. The lack of sufficient funds was very worrisome since we did not know WHEN payment would be required. And yes, there is a point to why I’m mentioning all of this. 
Honour “complicated” my chore by giving me the most spectacular thank-you gift ever – a GORGEOUS quilt, map of Canada, from one of the First Nation stores we visited. Obviously THAT was coming in my bag!!! My bad – I have NOT taken a picture of it to add to this post. Maybe I’ll give the blanket its very own post!
“The way we do it here” (a phrase that Honour has already heard dozens of times and will undoubtedly here scores more as she settles into her new life) for the ferry is to line up along the side of the road, waiting for the ferry to arrive. It pulls in, and the ferrymen direct vehicles off the ferry. They do indeed direct vehicles on and off the ferry in order to keep the load balanced. 
Once on the ferry and underway, he and I roamed all over the boat, taking pics of EVERYTHING. I have photos of the shoreline receding, the shoreline approaching, the seagulls, other boats, islands, water, sky. It was wonderful!!! The weather was perfect. I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned this or not, but we have been amazingly lucky with the weather. You can see the beautiful blue sky and puffy clouds as we made our way across the water. 
We paused at the slight rise of the hill before her house, and then pulled up the street and into the driveway. HOME!!!!! 6032 kilometers and here we were. (I see that Honour has said elsewhere it was 6007 km, but I’m pretty sure we marked it as 6032. In either case – quite a journey.)
First we had to block any possible hiding holes in the house.
As it turned out, we’d missed a hole, but they came out that night and Honour had a chance to block it then.
Honour suggested putting the cat bed on him and I did. *grin* He seemed much better after that. I did observe the bed moving around in the tub, so I knew he was alive. Fergus saw me and tore up the stairs to the second floor. Honour kept telling me that the boys had NEVER seen stairs before, but I must say that Fergus took to them like a native. 🙂 I guess nothing could be worse than being on the same floor with me. *grin* Honour spent the entire trip assuring all the animals that EVERYTHING was MY fault and that everything horrible was because I made it so. *laughing* I guess they believed it.
And it was okay with me because, after all, Honour has to live with them. 🙂
I mean it was on the shoulder of the road, not in an adjoining lot. On the ROAD! 🙂 Of course I took a picture. I KNEW we were in civilization because there was a DUNKIN’ DONUTS!!!! Actually, I really like Tim Horton’s coffee, too, so I’m not sure why DD was so much fun to see. Honour had a chance to check some email before we headed out. She heard from the movers (who had her cell phone number, you know, so they could have CALLED her or TEXTED). They were still in Alberta. You remember Alberta, right? That was day TWO for us. And by the way – a bank draft would be fine. So all our frantic attempts to accumulate sufficient cash in 48 hours (which failed, by the way) were unnecessary.
Unfortunately I needed to go home. I would have stayed another night or 2 with Honour but we could not find any place that had 2 nights open. Honour could not take me to Bangor for a flight home on Friday, as she had to wait for various workers to come turn things on that day. Although, in hindsight, I don’t know WHO actually came to do WHAT, because everytime Honour had tried to reach Bell Aliant they told her “oh you’ll have to buy that equipment and install it yourself”. Honour is going to be learning a LOT of new skills on that island. 🙂 Our trip together ended with me in a Bangor hotel and Honour beginning the long trip back to her island home. 🙂 The fantastic view, her dog, her cats, her home. 
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