Art Makes a Home*

I moved my art in yesterday. It's amazing what a difference that makes in elevating WholeHearted House from feeling like a "camp" to feeling like my home.
I have several pieces of cherished original art, all painted by friends.

I feel very lucky to have such wonderful paintings and I am glad I invested in them. I also have just about the right amount of original art for this house. I could maybe squeeze in a couple more pieces... Little ones. Tiny Art.

My largest painting is a skyscape entitled Fire by Lynn Misner of the PowerHouse Gallery in Lunenburg. I've put it in the only place in the house where it will fit! (The space I've left next to it is for a set of antique shelves that are coming from my folks' house in a couple of weeks):

Lynn Misner's skyscape, Fire as hung on the wall of my Tiny Home (and yes, those are my winter tires at the back – NOT their permanent storage spot, I trust)

My smallest painting is an abstract, Ocean Girl (named for me <3) by Tanya Philipovich. It can fit in all sorts of places and will probably move around periodically. Right now, it is across from my armchair where I spend a lot of my time:

And my two (I must admit) favourite paintings are at the head and foot of my bed.

At the foot, The Caretaker, again by Lynn Misner. This is the painting I licensed to use on the cover of my third album, Blackbirds. And then I bought the original, even though I couldn't really afford it at the time:

At the head, "Prometheus" by A. Shay Hahn. This is the very first original painting I ever purchased. I fell in love with it at first sight:

As a side note, I once had a conversation with my mom about these two paintings. "It's interesting," I noted, "that they both have red flowers in the grass."

She replied that it was a much more striking similarity that they are both paintings of people walking away from the viewer.

I hadn't noticed that similarity. I suppose we are often unconscious of our organizing principles, and I think my passion for these paintings has a great deal to do with my organizing principles. With these two paintings at the head and foot of my bed, they are now walking away from each other forever. I find that satisfies a place in me that is all about loss and longing.

Note: I think the art is hung a little high on the walls. I'm used to 9ft+ ceilings in my last couple of apartments. I like art to be at eye level, and the ceilings in the Tiny House are low... What do you think?

*And my cat. Art and my cat make a home, but this is a blog post about art, not about my cat. I just had to mention him though, however briefly.

The Move: Part 6 (Hey Bus Driver, Speed up a LIttle Bit!)

Nothing about the pace of this move is going as planned.

First, I moved my living quarters into the Tiny House a couple of weeks early, because I wanted to give my cat a home, without him having to move more often than absolutely necessary.

Yesterday, during a party and after telling about 30 kindly interested people that I had my rental place until May 31, I received a message from my landlord, asking me if it would be possible to be out on April 30 instead of May 31. He has other tenants lined up, which is great, as it is not always easy to fill rentals out here, but the tenants would ideally like to be in on the first of May rather than the first of June.

The next tenants are currently under-housed and I see no reason to withhold adequate housing from people for a month just so I can have the nice leisurely move I had imagined. Fortunately, I don't have much desk work today or tomorrow; all my layout/design clients seem to be chill for the holiday weekend. So, I will get in up to my elbows with the sorting and discarding tasks that await me.

It will not be easy. It is scary in there. While I was so busy over the past couple of months, I dumped everything on the floor thinking, "I'll deal with that in the move."And, when some folks moving into the neighbourhood bought a lot of my furniture, all of the contents of said furniture went on to the floor.

I include a photo or my rental space which may horrify some and delight others:

And here is a picture of the Tiny House in it's current minimal (and rather messy) set up (I'm thinking of moving the bed to the other end of the house...):

Wish me luck with the move, and don't forget that I'm having two events a week from today – a sale of excess items at the West Dublin Hall during the Market from 9-1 and a concert to fundraise for Tiny Home infrastructure in the evening at 8pm, also at the West Dublin Hall. I'd love to see you on April 26!

Careful with that axe, Eugene (Ummagumma)

The little bit of wood that I had left at my rental house has been cut in half and is now small enough to fit in my tiny stove, by the same kindly neighbour to whom I both sold and donated wood in the fall. Good karma – gotta love it.

Though the wood is now short enough to fit inside, the thick chunks don't burn very well in my stove. My Tiny Stove is fussy, I am learning. It is nowhere near as trouble-free as the giant air-tight wood stove I've been using for the past 3 years in my rental house.

And this means that for the first time since probably Girl Guide camp (at the age of 9), I have been using a hatchet to make the thick chunks into little sticks that burn more readily.

I am not particularly skilled with a hatchet. I have a bad shoulder and a tendency to close my eyes. My hand-eye coordination is good in general, but I find it doesn't work when my eyes are closed.

Today, at the suggestion of one of my landmates, I stepped up from the hatchet to the axe. "You can use two hands with the axe," she said "It goes faster."

I grinned sheepishly and replied, "I use two hands with the hatchet." 

But the axe really is less work. And now all of the wood I've brought up from my rental home is in little sticks. 

And my landmates only laughed at me once or twice.

And I don't hold that against them because, well, it was a hatchet job.

Waste Not, Want Not

This has been a hellish winter to try to heat with wood. It's been cold and rainy and snowy and windy and miserable; trying to keep a house warm with a wood stove this winter was a challenging task.

And it's ongoing. With nippy "spring" nights and mornings still happening here, it feels like everyone I talk with around here is lamenting their lack of wood.

I smugly bought 6 cords last fall. So much wood, I thought, that I blithely sold a little bit to a chilly neighbour waiting on a delivery of firewood back in October. When he ran out of wood again a little later, I gave him some more, this time asking no payment – "If I run out in the spring, you can get my back with some of that wood you're getting delivered."

Here it is, spring, he's totally out of wood and I'm almost out!

Fortunately, it's staying far enough above zero that my rented house is in no danger of the pipes freezing.

I've moved to the tiny house, which came with 8 feed bags of wood (mostly lumber scraps and kindling).

Which I have burned.

Plus about 5 feed bags full of lumber scraps that my Pops donated to the cause.

All burned.

And so, today, I found myself crouching down to scavenge at the spot where the wood gets dumped here at my rented house each fall. I filled 3 feed bags with sticks and bits of bark that were deemed too small to bother with in past years as the wood was being stacked. Worthless bits of scrap turned precious, and happily just the right size to fit into my Tiny Stove.

As I gathered them up, I thought of generations past who no doubt gathered up and burned every single morsel of fuel they could. I thought of Laura Ingalls Wilder twisting hay into sticks to stave off the cold of the Long Winter. And of Dublin waifs following the carts delivering coal and peat in the hopes a piece or two would fall.

And I suspect that I'll be back here to pick up the pieces I deemed too small to bother with today. Let no scrap be wasted.

Cats iz analog: 18 fun things you can do without electricity

I'm currently living in my Wholehearted House without a power system. I still have some battery-powered devices and an off-site, fully-wired office, so I haven't exactly broken up with electricity. One of my jobs is quite high-tech, I love social media and the ability to phone, Skype or Facetime with people who are far away. And I don't think any of that is going to change.

I thought about getting a big solar power generation system set up for my Tiny Home with an inverter and everything so I could use the trailer's existing AC system. But, I think I'm now leaning towards simply reducing my electricity consumption to what I can derive from a small solar panel, which I will hook up to one 12-volt battery (which I can also arrange with friends to periodically recharge on the grid, if the sun continues its cruel abandonment of Nova Scotia). The battery will charge the trailer's existing DC electrical system and hopefully provide enough power for a cellphone signal amplifier and occasional charges for my phone and for a rechargeable lantern.

So far, I've been quite surprised about the extent to which I'm not missing having power. I have a wood stove for heat, a propane stove for cooking and a propane fridge - though frankly at this time of year I don't even have the fridge turned on. I should stick a thermometer in there to see how cold it is, but the fact that the little bit of low-risk food I have in there is maintaining its quality is reassurance enough for now. I have a battery-powered head lamp for manoeuvring when I wake up in the pre-dawn darkness. My water is carried by hand, not pumped. My house is up off the ground, so I don't need a sump pump. I don't have running hot water, so no hot water heater is required.

It's amazing how, with some shared infrastructure, I should be able to access everything I need without having to OWN very much.

And I'm re-discovering that there are very pleasant things to do without electricity. Here are a few:

The might hunter stalks The Red Dot.

1. Play with the cat (Salinger is a frisky under 1-year-old who can spend literally hours being entertained with The Red Dot (laser pointer) or the stick with the pompom on an elastic string)
2. Enjoy the wonders of a MacBook Pro's long-lasting battery for writing blog posts, letters, stories, etc, (without interruptions from the Internet)
3. Play guitar
4. Sing
5. Continually monitor and frequently tend the fire in the wood stove
6. Do yoga
7. Play solitaire, you know, with a deck of cards
8. Do jigsaw puzzles
9. Cuddle, pet, brush and generally fuss over the cat
10. Stare at the fire and think
11. Make love (I'm flying solo these days, but you don't have to)
12. Nap
13. Read
14. Have visits with friends, possibly involving a game of cards, Scrabble or backgammon – or a discussion that is not resolved by recourse to Wikipedia
15. Make lists
16. Make things (i.e.: crochet, knit, sew by hand, hook rugs)
17. Look for the cat (I have been stunned to find that Salinger can successfully hide in 232 square feet! He has foxed me at least twice already, squeezing in to spaces I never dreamed he could fit into.)
18. Sleep

If all of these things sound incredibly relaxing that's because they are. I've always loved Earth Hour and now there are a whole lot more of them in my life.

Do you ever deliberately take a break from electricity? What do you do when the power goes out? What powered activities are stressing you out? What powered activities do you think you could or couldn't give up? I'm curious to know, so please comment below.

Tiny Home Living: The first few days...

The first few days in Wholehearted House have been fully alive and wholehearted – and not exactly easy.

Transitions are often hard. Humans don't usually take kindly to change. And this change has been accompanied by more than a few tears.
And by rain.
Rain.
Rain.
More rain.
Followed by sleet mixed with snow.
Followed by rain.
And this morning, snow.

The wintry Tiny Home in April.

Four days of it, going on five. Heavy and miserable. The ground is sodden, the brook swollen.

If this were a novel, the weather could be a device to show my grief for my recently-ended relationship, or to show the washing away of my old life as I make a clean slate of it, and then the eventual freezing of my heart. But this is not a novel. This is real life. And although I feel grief and also feel parts of my old life washing away, the rain has just been rain: a cold, wet, windy, incessant, annoying pain in the ass. And my heart is not even the tiniest bit cold or frozen.

Despite the rain, I am here and Salinger is here and we are finding ourselves pretty well-suited, overall. Sure, Sal hid under the fridge with all the wires for the first day, but that's pretty typical cat behaviour. I've since closed that area off with cardboard and tape (which is pretty typical human behaviour).

I've shed a few tears and felt rather fragile. I have let myself have those feelings and they are passing off. 

And I've received countless kindnesses: hugs, visits and a cooked supper with cider and cookies from my various landmates. My massage therapist (also a good friend) called me up when I completely forgot about my massage on Sunday morning, rescheduled it for an hour later and let me cry on her shoulder when I got there. I've had many Facebook messages and countless offers of places to have hot showers. I live in a profoundly embracing, generous neighbourhood and feel surrounded by good and caring friends.

And, I have the fortune of being able to make my move slowly. Right now, it's pretty minimal in here. I have my bed, two comfy chairs and 6 folding chairs in the Tiny House. I have a few bits of food, my cutlery, some knives and a cutting board, some tea towels and a set of fire irons.

I have my old place until May 31 so I have lots of time to continue to use it as an office and as a place to recharge my laptop and phone and to weed out all of my things. One of my big typesetting projects got put to bed a couple of days ago, so I will have more time to invest in my move. I am looking forward to embracing this life more and more fully. And always with a whole heart.