Ala in Springbank.

The kitchen I redid in the little broken house in Springbank with swooshy shelves someone told me looked like Gaudi's architecture and then I looked up Gaudi, and so they did! That's neat. 'Cause I think, if you have a jigsaw, why do your shelves need to be so rectangular all the time, eh? Had to rip the moldy sorta shelves out and found this oak plywood on sale to cover them and it was lovely lovely. Knocked through a wall so we had a kitchen-diner, as they say. Also, it didn't have a south-facing window, so I asked Clarence if I was allowed to use my chainsaw and he said "you can raise the roof and put on a second story, I don't care." :)We had a lot of fun fixing up that house. Did the front room first because we won a free piano (gorgeous more-than-century-old one) by writing a little essay, and we needed to have the front room ready for it. Luckily the landlords had gone on holidays for the first month we moved to their place, so we actually lived in their mansion across the lake while we made the first room habitable. (I must rewrite this story in some logical order some day.)

Still a pretty small space but a happyish one and we rescued that house enough for the landlords to keep it instead of bulldozing it as originally planned -- their grand-daughter moved in when we left.

When we lived there Alazha had loads of mice to eat because it was an old ranching property with lots of barns and sheds that my landlord had been born on and he was 80. Yarrow walked to grade 1 school and the horses kept him company the half-mile through the property before he crossed through the tunnel through the windbreak caraganas and there were legendary snow drifts that year, the kind that were several feet tall with a tough crust on them.

Anyway, Ala had to cross past another house on the property that had so many barking dogs (they were renters, I think they had like 5 or 8 dogs? so much noise) to go to the barns where most of the mice were but she made the pilgrimage sometimes and might not come back overnight if she was quite busy mousing.

Clara used to catch little mice or shrews and put them on Yarrow's pillow to pay the rent. <3 so loving.

AND I kept trying to garden in that windswept place, and we had so many gophers. So many. One time Alazha caught a massive I mean massive gopher and she brought it and gave it to me as a gift in the kitchen and there was blood EVERYWHERE and I yelled and then I felt so bad for yelling at her because she went to so much work to bring me such a huge catch and how uncharitable it was of me to put it outside again. I tried to tell her I was grateful for the love but still, I am not sure she exactly forgave me for not being grateful straightaway. Anyway, I remain impressed that she caught such a huge beast.