what’s been happening: at work yesterday i was eating blackberries off bushes on the side of the road and they dribbled down my shirt, staining my uniform. it’s the season of bounty and so far i have canned yellow plum juice from denise’s plums and made plum/raspberry, banana/blueberry and banana/grape leather from dad’s rasps, blueberries and grapes! i also scored a flat of over-ripe strawberries from a local farm for 18$ and made super addictive strawberry leather. i’m not allowed to eat these things though, because they’re mainly for future canoe trips!

two weeks ago, on the wee island for the weekend, i went out for an evening solo ocean paddle to another nearby island where i basked in the setting sun and rising moon and did a bit of dancing and driftwood gathering. the brakes on the truck continued to stymie me, as i still had only limited tools and brought over what i thought i needed. the tube nuts on the lines were so corroded that the right size flare wrench was too big. next time i will be armed with a torch and more tools. and next time will be happening in six days! the barge is lined up and me and the bus and the cat are moving over! waaaa-oow! the beginning of the long-term dream. i have been re-varnishing the gunwales on the cedar canoe in preparation for winter storage, and organizing the bus to re-pack all of my everything into it. being a human who gathers things she needs as they come up, i have acquired two free screen doors and four windows, along with 8 more sheets of plywood for the inside of the shed, among many smaller things. i am not sure how this re-packing is going to go. my carrie friend hosted a wee gathering of folks to watch her favourite movie outdoors on a big screen last week. her favourite movie being ‘guardians of the galaxy’. have you seen this movie people? it’s HILARIOUS. normally i wouldn’t have thought to watch it because it looks like it has a lot of scary bits and i don’t do scary movies. but holy shit, was i glad i did. and THEN, as if one weren’t enough, we watched the second one. i was up til 2am. oh boy. it was worth it.

rae and max left for europe and another semester of school and i miss them, but now i have the same sweatshirt as rae so i can think of her all the time. we had what i called thanksgiving dinner at denise and kurt’s for rae and max’s departure. i mainly called it this because denise cooked up a huge turkey for us, but also because the big hodge-podge of us were all together and i was sure grateful for that. until denise called me a little bitch while we were playing settlers of catan and she wasn’t getting her way. (just kidding. still grateful). i got back a roll of film that had some sweet double exposures on it! that’s one thing that one has to love about film. i love playing with double exposures, you can’t plan them, you don’t know what you’re going to get, but sometimes one happens that bowls you over with beauty. this one is a mix of a west coast barnacled tide-pool, with one of carson canoeing at sunset (check it: the title image).