The good stuff list

And in other news today:

I am feeling less crap.  This is good. I have not cried once today.  The day is not yet over, but the children are in bed, so it’s a fairly safe bet than unless they’re showing reruns of Lassie on T.V. I will get through an entire twenty four hours without blubbing. Huzzah.  I still can’t bear the sight of myself, but I am more resigned and less mortified.  I think it helped that the optician rang to say they are pretty certain my contacts will turn up tomorrow, and although the optician will be out, she has allowed me to go in, get them fitted by an assistant and road test them over the Easter weekend. This is just lovely of her, and I am very touched.  Maybe she watched me howling in the car park outside her office and came over all maternal.

The sun shone.  Not all day. That would be too much to ask for, but certainly all afternoon.  And it was warm enough for us to drive with the windows down.  It’s amazing what a smidgeon of sunshine will do for a soul cloaked in gloom.  Here it seems extra lovely because the warmth of the sun brings out the smells of the pine trees, the damp earth, and the spring flowers and it all becomes a little bit magical.  This magic is helped along by the fact that our part of the island is a peninsula, so as we drive about we can generally see the sea out of one, if not two of the car windows and sometimes you can smell the ozone too, which I love.  We drove to a small town called Brentwood Bay today.  You can catch a ferry from there across the water to Mill Bay on the other side.  If you are going ‘up island’ it cuts out a forty five minute car journey round the water’s edge.  It’s a lovely trip when the weather is good, and today the water was as calm as a mill pond and the clouds were scudding by, and you could see them twice, once in the sky and once in the glassy water, along with the Malahat mountain behind it.  Which is still covered in snow.  It was glorious.

We went swimming again this afternoon.  This time I braved the water, which shows how much I must be feeling better as it was a communal changing room and swimsuit time. I only cringed a bit.  Plus I had to wear my glasses in the water, which always makes me nervous.  Anyway, it was all fine and after an hour I can proudly announce that I taught Tallulah how to swim. It was exhausting, but she can now float on her back kicking her legs and not drowning.  This is excellent news all round.  She is terribly impressed with herself, as she rightly should be, and announced while we were getting dry that the next thing she wants to do is to learn the butterfly stroke.  That’s my girl!

The pancake death toll is rising.  We succumbed to lunch at Smitty’s.  For those of you who don’t know, this is the Canadian equivalent of the U.S. diner, Denny’s.  It is the closest they come to the U.K. greasy spoon, but there is less tea and more pancakes.  We love diners, and we love pancakes so it was all good.  I had steak and eggs with my pancakes.  Unorthodox but delicious.  I did of course have maple syrup on them.  It would have been rude not to.

I found an awesome thrift shop in Brentwood Bay.  I love thrift shops, which are the Canadian/U.S. equivalent to charity shops.  There is a huge thrift supermarket in Victoria.  It is my birthday in just over a week and one of my birthday requests is an hour alone in the thrift supermarket.  What joy!  Anyway, today I got some fabulous knitting and embroidery patterns for my lovely mama, and two treasures for me.  Firstly a wonderful paper silhouette picture in black on white of children picking apples from a tree and dancing about in the branches.  It is something called Paperklip which seems to be a Danish artform.  Mine is by someone called Eli Fenger Benwell and I love it.  I also got a Royal Doulton eggshell blue tea cup in bone china with white leaves and flowers in a border just under the rim.  If I get these treasures home in one piece it will be a miracle.

The weather was so nice when we got home that we were able to open the French doors onto the deck and let the children play football on the grass while we cooked dinner.  It made me think that summer might actually happen one day soon, eventually, maybe.  The fact that they had to play it in wellingtons while the water purled around their ankles is neither here nor there.

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