Beating The Bean Breeze

June 15, 2016October 2, 2018 / Diane Henders / 59 Comments

Sometimes I just don’t think things through the way I should. For example, the other day I had beans for lunch… a few hours before going for a massage.

So the masseur is working on my lower back and hamstrings, and I’m thinking, “Uh-oh. Those beans are kicking in. What’s the etiquette here?”

I mean, the whole point of a massage is to relax. Clenching one’s butt cheeks together kinda defeats the purpose. And having somebody put pressure on the inflated area really doesn’t help, either.

But what do you do?

Just let ‘er rip and pretend nothing happened? I don’t think so. Even if I managed to squeak out a silent-but-deadly, there are only two of us in the room. The masseur knows nothing came out of his ass, so the process of elimination (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun) is fairly simple. I’d know; he’d know; and each of us would know the other knew.

Or do I make up some polite lie? “Excuse me, I need to stand up to stretch out for a few minutes. Could you please leave the room and I’ll let you know when I’m back on the table?”

Seems like a good option at first, but if I really was just stretching and repositioning, it wouldn’t take that long. What happens when he comes back into the room and his eyes start to water? Then we’re right back to the painful process of pretending everything is fine while we both quietly asphyxiate and I melt into a puddle of sheer humiliation.

It might be better to get it all out in open (so to speak): “Sorry, I had beans for lunch and I’ve just now realized the consequences of that. If you value your hands you’ll take them away from the vicinity of my nether regions right now. Go stand outside, and I’ll tell you when it’s safe to come back in here.”

But I’m thinking that might make things a little awkward.

The worst part was that it made me think about Chaucer, and trying to suppress both a giggle and a fart nearly did me in.

I know that last sentence has left you wondering ‘WTF?!?’, particularly since I revealed some time ago that I hated all the literary classics.

Thus my mother’s devious brilliance is revealed. She was a teacher, and she found a foolproof way to interest recalcitrant teenagers in Middle English literature. She didn’t go on about how Chaucer is considered the father of English literature and the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages. Nope; one day she ever-so-casually mentioned that Chaucer had a dirty mind and wrote poems with farts in them.

Well, hello, “The Canterbury Tales”!

Which brings me full circle: Lying on the massage table trying not to reenact “The Summoner’s Tale” and suppressing giggles and farts with equal determination.

Can anybody help me out with the correct etiquette for the situation?

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Zen, Shmen.

June 8, 2016 / Diane Henders / 41 Comments

Sometimes a lifetime of voracious reading is an advantage; other times, not so much. On the upside, as long as I have a book (or newspaper or magazine or propaganda pamphlet or even a shampoo bottle with text on the label) I’ll never be bored.

On the downside, having a bottomless well of trivia in one’s brain isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I know what to do in just about any situation, but it’s not always practicable to do it.

For example, I know how to make a gas mask out of an empty bleach bottle, a bulletproof vest out of Bibles, and a deadly weapon out of a newspaper. I sincerely hope I’ll never be in a situation where I need these skills. But if I were, I suspect that the chances of actually having an empty bleach bottle, a stack of Bibles, or a newspaper are slim to none.

In the non-lethal side of my reading, I’ve also absorbed a startling variety of random information: Business and marketing and writing tips out the ying-yang, of course; but also fascinating factoids on everything from neuroplasticity, Buddhism, and quantum physics to Wicca, time management, and mindfulness meditation.

The latter two came to mind last weekend while I was broiling in my car at a dead stop in bumper-to-bumper traffic. There’s something about a traffic jam that ratchets my blood pressure up to Vesuvius levels. It’s part claustrophobia and part resentment over the waste of my all-too-scant ‘spare’ time.

The time management books tell me that sitting in traffic is an ideal time to plan to-do lists and so forth, but I think they underestimate my powers of concentration. (Which is a polite way to say I’m incapable of driving and thinking at the same time.) If I started plotting Book 12 while sitting in a traffic jam, I’d blink back to reality two hours later still parked in the same place while infuriated drivers honked and swerved around me, spewing invective and flipping me the universal gesture of fellowship and goodwill.

Or how about Zen and mindfulness? I should ‘be in the moment’. There was no emergency; I wasn’t late for any appointments; and there were absolutely no negative consequences that could result from my slowdown. I should just breathe. Relax and enjoy the downtime.

Zen, shmen. I knew a detour that would take me to my destination via the back ways and save me oodles of time!

Or not.

In the traffic jam, I had noticed that the black minivan ahead of me had a distinctive set of those little family-caricature decals on the back. When I finally made it to my destination half an hour after winding through a series of convoluted back streets, guess what I saw in front of me? That same damn minivan. Apparently it took precisely the same amount of time to inch through the traffic jam as it had taken me to follow my complicated detour.

That took a bit of the shine off my triumph, but not as much as you might think. I’d rather be actively driving than sitting in traffic for the same amount of time. And at least nobody yelled or flipped me off.

Zen traffic meditator or complex detour planner – which are you? And what’s the most obscure thing you’ve learned lately?

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Corrupting The Dragon

June 1, 2016 / Diane Henders / 70 Comments

*F-BOMB ALERT* This post contains a non-comprehensive list of swearwords and assorted vulgarities

When my nieces and nephews were young, I expended quite a bit of effort censoring my language while they were present. When they finally became adults, I breathed a giant sigh of relief and promptly shocked the shit out of them when I reverted to my normal vocabulary.

I didn’t really mean to let it out all at once; it was just that I was so glad to finally be past the point where I could be accused of corrupting innocents. I knew they’d heard it all before in school long before they ever heard those words pass my lips, but I didn’t want to be accused of being a bad example.

(Though, come to think of it, I’m still a bad example. But at least as adults they can choose whether it’s more appropriate to follow my bad example or just pretend they don’t know me.)

Anyhow, my point is: I thought my days as a corrupting influence were over.

I was wrong. Last week I corrupted a dragon.

Not a mythical beast (which would have been oh-so-cool), but a software dragon. Dragon Naturally Speaking, to be exact. It’s supposed to transcribe spoken words into typed text and I’m always looking for ways to streamline my work, so several weeks before Christmas I bit the bullet and laid my money down. Then I got so busy I didn’t have time to set it up.

But I finally had time to tackle it last week. After a rocky start in which it pretended to recognize my microphone but in fact ignored it (causing me to exercise my considerable vocabulary once again), I got everything installed and ready to go.

Dragon learns your vocal quirks and vocabulary as it goes along. One of the ways it does this is by reading through documents you’ve written and learning all the words that aren’t currently in its database.

You see where this is going, don’t you?

Yep, Dragon wanted to learn from me. And hoo-boy, did it! I was afraid its little software synapses were going to melt.

Its analysis of my latest book took quite a bit of time. Then it spat out a list of ‘new words’ that looked like a tutorial for a preacher’s son off the leash for the first time:

I didn’t know whether to laugh or be ashamed of myself. (I laughed, of course. Uproariously.) And I foresee even more laughter in the future, when the software mistakes innocent words for their less polite counterparts. Let’s just say that I won’t be using it anytime soon for writing business emails (unless I scrupulously edit it first).

To tell the truth, I’m little bit pleased that the next time Dragon messes up and makes me emit a burst of profanity, it’ll actually understand what I’m trying to say.

But I haven’t activated its ‘talk back’ feature yet. Somehow that just seems like asking for trouble…

Anybody else ever used a speech-to-text program? Any tips for getting the Dragon to sit up and pay attention?

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Sordid Chocolate Mousse

May 25, 2016 / Diane Henders / 42 Comments

As you’ve probably guessed if you’ve read my books, I’m a foodie – I love to eat, try new foods, and cook. Although when things go awry the way they did this week, well… not so much. But I’m addicted to recipes, and the internet is my evil enabler.

So this week I got sucked in by Blender Chocolate Mousse from a local food blogger’s site: Dinner With Julie. The recipe required a blender (quelle surprise), which I rarely use because it’s a pain in the ass to clean. But all the stars and planets had aligned: I had my food processor out anyway, I happened to have whipping cream in my fridge, and the recipe sang its siren song.

(Note the critical disparity in the previous paragraph: Blender Chocolate Mousse. I have a food processor. This is how fiascos begin.)

Per the instructions, I chucked the chocolate in the food processor, poured in the hot custard, and fired that sucker up. Knowing that disaster lurks behind the simplest activities, I heeded Julie’s advice to put a towel over the food processor just in case. But it performed faultlessly – not a single drop of chocolate marred my towel. Smugly congratulating myself, I removed the towel and took off the food processor lid.

That’s when everything went to hell.

Blenders have watertight lids. Food processors have lids with a large hole in them for the pusher device. As soon as I tilted the lid to scrape the mousse off the inside, the pusher thing fell out on the counter. It was, of course, covered with liquid chocolate mousse. It bounced. Several times.

Chocolate mousse splattered over several feet of counter, the backsplash, other appliances and me. That generated some creative language, but little did I know it was only a foreshadowing of things to come.

The blending bowl in my food processor has an open tube in the centre for the driveshaft, and the blade housing sits atop it. So you have to remove the blade housing before you pour anything out of the blending bowl.

Liquid chocolate mousse is really slippery. The blade housing is a smooth plastic cone. I couldn’t get hold of it.

After scrabbling uselessly at it for longer than I care to admit, I finally brained up and hooked a spatula under the blade. When I pulled it out, chocolate mousse dribbled through the bowl opening, all over the driveshaft, and all the way to the sink; but by then everything was so sticky that it didn’t make much difference. I poured the mousse into ramekins and turned to the cleanup.

In my defense, I’d like to reiterate that it was chocolate mousse. And wasting chocolate is a crime.

At least, that was my excuse when Hubby rounded the corner and caught me licking the shaft of the food processor. For the record, there are few things more embarrassing than getting caught performing fellatio on a kitchen appliance. Especially when it’s one you don’t even love.

I mean, I could be forgiven for getting it on with my sexy European tomato press. Even being caught in the act with my virile high-powered juicer wouldn’t have been so bad. But a chocolate-smeared food processor? It just seemed so… sordid.

Anyway, I got the kitchen cleaned up at last, and the mousse was delicious – silky-smooth and over-the-top chocolatey.

But I’m not sure it was worth it.

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The Spandex Menace

May 18, 2016 / Diane Henders / 35 Comments

I just got back from another road trip, and I feel it’s my duty to warn everyone about the threat I discovered while travelling: stretch pants. They may feel comfy, but the truth is that those spandex tubes are plotting against our health and fitness.

Oh, they conceal their evil intentions well enough. They call themselves ‘exercise wear’ and pretend to encourage us in a healthy lifestyle, but all the while they’re sabotaging our efforts. In fact… (call the tabloids, ‘cause this is hot stuff) spandex actually nourishes fat cells.

How did I determine this, you ask?

Through rigorous scientific observation and testing, of course. After all, have you ever known me to jump to a conclusion or engage in hyperbole? Never in a million-zillion years!

Here’s how I figure it:

I’m normally a jeans girl. Whether I’m digging in the garden or working on a car or banging together some ridiculously over-engineered carpentry project, jeans provide practicality, comfort, and protection. But when I know I’m going to be sitting in the car for hours at a time, I change into stretch pants. So last week I put on the spandex and hit the road.

Well. Let me tell you.

After six days, I donned my jeans again only to discover that my butt runneth over. My muffin-top has grown into a dinner roll. And the only possible culprit is (you guessed it) stretch pants.

I mean, really, it couldn’t have been anything else. I was eating my usual three meals a day plus one dessert. Maybe the meals were approximately double my normal portion; but six days shouldn’t make that much difference, right? I even skipped my four o’clock snack most days, so I’m sure I should’ve been losing weight.

And eating a giant ice cream cone every day couldn’t have been the cause. Ice cream is a dairy product, which is healthful. Health food couldn’t possibly make me gain weight.

Plus, all that time in the car was hard on my nerves, and everybody knows stress ratchets up your metabolism. I should have been melting the pounds away. It’s simple logic.

But I didn’t. So it must have been the fault of the stretch pants.

Those bastards clung to my body for six straight days, whispering sweet nothings to my fat cells and feeding their egos until they swelled up like little pillows. Then the fat cells invited all their friends over to my waistline and had themselves a party. The friends invited more friends, and pretty soon the whole place was overflowing.

Now, like disapproving parents, my jeans have returned to the scene of the party to evict the interlopers. So far they’ve only succeeded in squeezing them up and over my waistband, but I hope if I call the calorie police right away they’ll be able to banish the last of the stragglers.

But meanwhile, no more stretch pants. Take it from me, those suckers are the enemy.

Remember, you heard it here first!

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New discussion over at the VBBC: Stemp Then And Now. How has Stemp changed the series, and how has it changed him? Click here to have your say!

What’s That Rusty Colour?

May 11, 2016May 12, 2016 / Diane Henders / 59 Comments

A few years ago I confessed my lack of regard for fine distinctions in paint colour, and I should have known it would come back to bite me in the ass.

This week I’ve been doing some touchups around the house. Nothing big – a couple of swipes of drywall compound, light sanding, and a feathering of paint to blend in the patch.

I’ve done it dozens of times over the years and usually it’s easy. But sometimes the stars and planets misalign and the patron saint of painting goes on a bender and can’t be roused from the hangover. Then everything that can go wrong, does; and several things that couldn’t possibly go wrong, do anyway.

The drywall repairs went smoothly (pun intended). Then I trotted out to the garage to find the leftover house paints, which were all labelled, colour-matched, and ready to go (I thought).

I decided to start with the small patch on the bathroom ceiling. There were two paint cans, both labelled ‘flat white ceiling paint’. Fine. I optimistically pried the lid off one, mixed it, and applied a test swatch.

It wasn’t white. Nowhere near. Nope, it was an odd rusty colour.

I repeated the process with the second can.

Same weird colour.

I was beginning to question my own sanity when I realized the rusty colour was spreading like some vile algae on the test swatch.

Yep, there were rust flakes in the paint. I’d like to say ‘I’ll never understand why paint comes in cans that rust and wreck the paint ten seconds after you open them’, but the truth is I do understand. It’s a diabolical scheme to force us to go out and buy a whole new batch of paint for every single project, no matter how minor.

So I succumbed to the inevitable and headed for the paint store. Little did I know that my karmic debt was about to be called in, with interest and penalties:

I was in a hurry (first mistake) so I asked the paint person for a quart of flat white ceiling paint, took the can she handed me, paid, and left.
She screwed up. It was untinted neutral base, which is translucent. Back to the store, stand in the returns lineup, then go back to the paint department.
Decide to get drywall primer instead, thinking that’s what I had used as a finish coat last time anyway. (Second mistake: relying on my shitty memory.)
Discover the drywall primer is also translucent. Back to the paint store.
Find FLAT WHITE CEILING PAINT. They don’t have any quarts; only gallons.
Buy a gallon of paint (approximately 20 times what I need for my small patch) because it’s only $7 more than a quart, and I’d spend more than that in gas, time, and annoyance going somewhere else.
Take the paint home, open it, ascertain that it is in fact the right paint and the right colour.
Paint over my patch and feather the edges onto the existing painted ceiling, finally accomplishing the ten minutes of work that I set out to do about eight hours ago.
Go to bed, not exactly happy but at least relieved.
Wake up the next morning to discover the new paint has dried to a different shade of white than the original, so now I have to repaint the entire ceiling.
Slit my wrists, staining the ceiling a very unpleasant rusty colour indeed…

How was your week?

P.S. I’ll be away from the internet most of the day today, so I’ll catch up with comments as soon as I can in the evening or tomorrow. ‘Talk’ to you then!

New discussion over at the VBBC: Is John selfish or supportive? Click here to have your say!

Riffing On The ‘Raff

May 4, 2016May 4, 2016 / Diane Henders / 66 Comments

Every now and then reality smacks me upside the head and shouts, “Hey, get a clue!” This has been one of those weeks.

It started the other day when I was in my gym uniform of yoga pants and T-shirt with a fleece jacket over top. I looked down and realized I was colour-coordinated from my shoes to my sunglasses: Black sneakers with green and turquoise on them, black yoga pants, turquoise T-shirt, black jacket, and sunglasses with the same green as my sneakers.

It was a wholly unnatural state, and I felt like a poser because I’m normally neither yoga-panted nor colour-coordinated. (Granted, pairing black with black isn’t much of a fashion achievement, but it’s still far more presentable than I usually look.)

Other than a momentary twitch of surprise, I didn’t think much of it at the time. But it came back to me later while I was talking with a real estate agent who had apparently mistaken me for a member of the DINK upper-crust. (That’s an acronym for ‘Dual-Income, No Kids’; not the lowercase ‘dink’ as in ‘prick’. But I suppose some might dispute the distinction.)

Anyhow, she was promoting a property that had stringent architectural controls and restrictive covenants. She dropped the name of a big celebrity who lived down the road, and rhapsodized about how wonderful the restrictions were because they maintained the property values. She didn’t actually go so far as to say “It keeps the riff-raff out”, but the subtext was clear.

While she nattered, I was thinking, “But what’s wrong with having a flagpole? And if it’s a 20-acre property surrounded by trees, nobody will ever see the house anyway – so why should it matter what colour it is? And what’s wrong with leaving a dirt bike parked beside the house?”

That’s when reality jumped up and bitch-slapped me.

Well, shit. I’m the riff-raff that they want to keep out.

I’ve always thought that someday I’d grow up and develop taste and sophistication, but y’know what? I’m over fifty. If it was going to happen, it would have already.

The stark realization is staring me in the face: I’m never going to wake up in the morning with a burning desire to wear expensive designer clothes. I’m never going to want to live in a fancy gated community where the cream of society looks down on people who are gauche enough to park their recreational vehicles… wait for it… outside the garage where the neighbours might see them! *gasp*

I’ll always be the woman who, when Hubby asks if we need to fuel up before driving out of town, replies, “Nope, I’ve got gas. Oh, and my car’s fuelled up, too.”

So maybe it’s time to leave my matching gym ensemble in the drawer and embrace my inner riff-raff in my baggy faded work jeans with the contact cement on the knee and grease smear on the ass. And maybe I should get some ratty T-shirts with obnoxious slogans like “Love me, love my dirt bike” or something equally shocking.

After all, if I’m gonna take my place among the riff-raff, I’d better do it right. It’d suck if I wasn’t good enough for them.

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How To Be A Slacker

April 27, 2016April 27, 2016 / Diane Henders / 64 Comments

*F-BOMB ALERT* – CONTAINS (more) COARSE LANGUAGE (than usual)

My internet research frequently goes off into the weeds and/or down rabbit holes, so I wasn’t particularly surprised the other day when I found myself reading a list of impromptu speech topics.

I used to enter public speaking competitions when I was a kid, and I enjoy presenting prepared talks to audiences large or small. But I’ve always loathed impromptu contests, where they assign a random topic and you get one minute to prepare before giving your speech. (Or, in my case, you get one minute to sit frozen in sheer panic before standing up to mumble humiliating gibberish.)

So it was with a shudder of sympathy that I read the list of topics designed to torture juvenile victims: Deadly stuff like “Why I deserve an allowance” and “Interesting things you see in the sky”. Then I came across this one: “How to be a slacker”.

Wait, what?

Where was this topic when I was a kid? Not necessarily for an impromptu speech (nothing could have helped me through that) but as a life-skills course. The more I thought about it, the clearer my realization dawned: I don’t know how to be a slacker!

I mean, I guess I know the basic recipe: Sprinkle incompetence liberally over the task at hand, lock up your flying fucks and rat’s asses (you don’t want to give any of those), and marinate the whole thing in apathy before leaving it half-baked.

But it just doesn’t seem to work out for me.

I’ve never quite managed to chase every last flying fuck from the vicinity – there’s always a little one hovering around somewhere. And I’ve been down to my last pox-riddled rat’s ass a few times, but I’ve never been completely out of rat’s asses to give.

I’ve got a decent supply of incompetence, but I prefer not to use it – it leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth.

And by definition apathy is hard to procure: as soon as you attempt to generate it, you’re trying too hard.

There must be some trick to slackerdom. Maybe I need to drink more. I’ve heard that rat’s asses and flying fucks dissolve in alcohol, and booze also seems to bulk up incompetence nicely. Even the elusive apathy precipitates well from an alcoholic solution.

When I told Hubby I was writing a post on how to be a slacker, he inquired, “Why didn’t you ask me? I could have advised you.”

I replied that I didn’t think he was good enough at it… but on second thought, I’ve reconsidered. After all, he’s the one who introduced me to this concept: If you do it badly enough the first time, they won’t ask you again.

So far he’s successfully applied that technique to dusting, being my administrative assistant, shovelling snow, and bookkeeping. I guess I should’ve been watching him and learning; but every time I try, those pesky flying fucks keep getting in my way.

Any advice? What’s the best way to be a slacker?

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Hedge-Sabres And Sky-Mice

April 13, 2016April 13, 2016 / Diane Henders / 41 Comments

We watched Star Wars Episode VII a few days ago. I’m not a rabid Star Wars fan, yet I still found myself re-enacting the epic lightsabre battle in my front yard for the amusement (or possibly bemusement) of the neighbours.

It started with a shrub.

Our house is one of those crappy layouts with vehicle access from the front, resulting in an unattractive “garage-with-house-attached” look. Most of our front yard is occupied by the concrete driveway, but we’ve created a perennial bed beside it. The bed contains a bunch of flowering plants, plus a single cotoneaster shrub that I keep trimmed to a manageable size.

The cotoneaster is not, however, in a convenient location. The driveway is on one side and there’s a stepping-stone path on the other, but the shrub is smack in the middle, just out of comfortable reach.

Enter me, stage left, wielding an electric hedge trimmer.

I had two choices: step into the perennial bed to get close enough to use the hedge trimmer with both hands the way it was meant to be operated… or balance precariously on one leg while leaning over to decapitate the cotoneaster with one-handed swipes of my deadly hedge-sabre.

Yeah, you know which one I chose. (For the record, about the worst time to get the giggles is when you’re balanced on one leg, flailing around with a power tool that’s capable of shearing off twigs the diameter of your finger. Fortunately I managed to escape a well-deserved painful injury.)

We also have a small decorative pond and waterfall in front of the house. We take the pump out for the winter, but the piping remains year-round. Somehow the water in the pipes manages to get stagnant and stinky even though it’s been frozen solid for six months, so we usually restart the pump on a breezy day. Even so, the area around the front of our house always reeks for a few hours.

The pond last spring. It looks benign, but don’t inhale for a day or so…

So imagine me, surrounded by stink and locked in a duel to the death with the cotoneaster, then add this to your ridiculous mental image: a swarm of frenzied sky mice swooping and chirping around me.

What are sky mice, you ask? Maybe you’ve heard pigeons described as ‘sky rats’; I call sparrows ‘sky mice’. They’re just as annoying, useless, and prolific as pigeons, just not as big. (I exclude song sparrows from this category – I’m talking about Chipping Sparrows, the little brown-capped guys that relentlessly repeat the same strident tuneless chirp from dawn to dusk. It’s like a dentist’s drill to the eardrum.)

The Chipping Sparrows love our pond, our sheltering trees and shrubs, and the bird-friendly seed and berry plants in my garden. I enjoy watching them through the window, but outside their incessant chirping drives me nuts. I once christened a scare owl ‘Rodney’ because he got no respect from the sky mice, but they don’t respect me, either.

Maybe I oughta go after them with my hedge-sabre. There’s a tiny chance that it might throw a scare into them, but more likely they’d just crack up with birdy giggles that sound just like their regular irritating chirp, only more derisive. They’re laughing at me, I know it.

Then again, considering my performance a few days ago, I can hardly blame them…

P.S. The Virtual Backyard Book Club kicks off today! Please click here or use the new Book Club button in the right-hand sidebar to join me on my virtual backyard patio for introductions! (I’m still ironing out the last of the wrinkles, so please bear with me…)

UPDATE: Speaking of wrinkles… If you tried to access the Book Club site and got stymied with logins and passwords, that was my fault. I messed up the settings, but they’re fixed now – please try again. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience! 😦

Coastal Cogitations

April 6, 2016 / Diane Henders / 43 Comments

I’m on vacation this week! We’re on Vancouver Island, and I’m enjoying both the change of scenery and the change of pace. My senses seem sharpened by the glorious sea air that smells so good I could make a meal of it.

Sometimes the enhanced sensory experience is wonderful; sometimes, erm… not so much. Here are my observations to date:

My paranoid writer’s mind never quits. Doesn’t this look like a concealed camera to you?

It’s in the ceiling of our hotel room and the rest of the knots are solid, but not this one. And you guessed it, it’s right above the bed. There’s even a shiny thing that looks like a lens inside the knothole.

Suspicious as always, I stood on the bed and poked my finger into the hole. All I could feel was plastic vapour barrier, so I’m hoping that’s the source of the gleam. But if you happen to discover amateur porn videos featuring Arlene Cherry on the internet, please don’t tell me. I’d really rather not know.

Pacific loons are the Fonzies of the ocean. Clad in sleek black, they kick back casually on the waves, far too cool for the rest of the seabirds. When they dive, it’s with a laid-back ease that makes the mergansers look like skinny little punks who are trying too hard.

I love good oysters, but there’s nothing worse than a bad oyster. And once it’s breaded and fried it’s impossible to tell the difference until after you’ve eaten it. You don’t want to know how I discovered this. But, as the saying goes, “This, too, shall pass”. And it did, quickly.

‘Moving’ right along…

I can’t decide whether I like the ocean better…

…in the sunshine when it’s blue and beautiful:

Or under cloudy skies when it looks like molten silver:

I love it when it’s stormy, too, but we’ve had beautiful weather the whole time we’ve been here so I didn’t get to photograph any big waves. Maybe next time.

I don’t know this for certain, but I suspect that the designer of the Hyundai Elantra’s seats sneaked into my house while I was sleeping, measured every inch of my body, and designed the seat contours specifically to torture me. (Fortunately the car rental company exchanged it for us, or I’d be in serious pain right now.)

No matter how devastating the damage, nature will eventually recover if it gets the chance. I was lucky to have visited Cathedral Grove before the big storm of 1997. It was still majestic after the storm, but the mossy grotto beneath the towering trees had become a brighter place criss-crossed with the massive trunks of the fallen giants. Now, nearly twenty years later, I’m happy to see that it’s slowly returning to its green and shade-dappled glory.

And best of all, the trilliums and daffodils and camellias are in full bloom, along with cherry trees, magnolias, tulips, hyacinths, forsythia, and just about everything else. I could keep snapping photos all day long, and the scented air is divine!

What’s blooming in your neck of the woods this week?

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P.S. We’ll be on the road today, so I won’t have a chance to respond to comments until we’re back this evening. “Talk” to you then!

P.P.S. If you haven’t had your say on the format for the Virtual Book Club yet, please click here to offer your comments. The Book Club will start next week!