I’ve spent the last 3 months going through a process of grieving and then adjusting to being a 1-dog household. I was pretty sure I wanted to keep it that way. So much quieter! So much easier!

But, the conviction faded as my heart healed more and more. Then I began to feel maybe I was being selfish to keep the possibility of a new companion away from Jack. Or as I began to say: I’m pretty sure Jack was using his super powerful brain waves to tell me it’s time for a puppy.

So I opened my heart more and more to the possibility, and then I began surfing the listings at the SPCA. That’s how you know you’re done-for.

My two desires were: not another shepherd cross, and not too big. Those were nice ideals while they lasted.

We met Lucy when she’d only been at the shelter 2 days. She was being held until she could be spayed so we had a few days to visit and think about it. But really, we were sold from the first belly rub. She is a very warm, eager, and bright puppy.

This is how I pictured today: We’d pick up a dopey, convalescing pup from the clinic. Bring her home, and she’d sniff around some, and curl up to sleep. I would get to work for the afternoon and be brilliantly productive. Bwahaha!

How it actually played out: Rambunctious puppy bounded around the clinic waiting room, bulldozing everything in site with her cone of shame. We drove home with her half on my lap, marveling at how FREAKING HUGE she is already. We took the cone off before she even got into the house so she and Jack could socialize better.

The next several hours were spent telling her “No” and giving her alternatives as she tried to chew, tug, jump up on just about everything in sight.

It’s been so long, we totally forgot about the need to puppy-proof the house.

So much for my brilliantly productive afternoon.

The 2010 Fresh Water Summit resulted in a petition proposing a Canadian Charter of Water Rights and Responsibilities. From the opening letter:

“We the undersigned recognize that water is fundamental to life. Without it all living things perish, some within a few minutes, most within a few days. We understand the essential role of water to life, to the ecosystem around us, and ultimately to our own well-being. We have a reverence for life, and a reverence for water.”

View/sign the Petition

I understood from the program that the communique from the summit is being delivered to leaders at the G20 but I couldn’t find any info online about that.

Little bits from the panel are swimming around in my brain right now. Things like:

• Pollution and other issues with bottled water. Barlow said something like if you take all the small bottles from water we drink, globally, annually, and lined them up, they would go to the moon and back 65 times. The vast majority are not recycled.
• The environment cannot be separated from health. When a child has to go to emergency with asthma, or people need treatment for cancers that can be caused by pollutants, people will talk about health care being a priority for them because that’s the urgent need at that time for that person. But at the root of it is an unhealthy ecosystem causing such health concerns.
• Incredibly wise words from so many of the speakers there. Henry Lickers in particular said some things that really resonated for me. And of course Maude Barlow was brilliant and inspiring as usual.

It doesn’t seem like the CBC makes this program very accessible online (from what I could find anyway) but if you do find it it’s well worth a listen.

It’s been a month since you died. I haven’t written until now because losing you has been such a powerful and profound experience for me. Maybe people who haven’t been as lucky as I have, who’ve experienced more losses in their lives, maybe they would be better at this than I am. Maybe they could write this without the tears. And yet, even though I feel like I’ve done a tremendous amount of healing in this month of mourning, I have been also feeling like there’s more stuck inside me that I need to get out. So I don’t know if I’ll even publish this or if anyone will care enough to read it, but I gotta do it. So I write and I cry.

At first it was the shock. How could our strong, beautiful, young dog be gone so quickly? Sick for a few short days, and then dead. Fucking dead. What?

We brought your body home from the vet, wrapped up in a blanket in the back of the car. God, you were still warm. I let Jack sniff you so he’d understand. He didn’t. Wouldn’t follow me away from the car. So I let him see you again, and then he did.

The next morning we picked a spot on the mountain for you and I carried you to it. You were so heavy but I needed to do that for some reason. We laid you there with your favourite red ball. Sometimes that ball seemed to be the only thing in the world that mattered more to you than I did.

And so you were buried.

I kept thinking: how do parents survive a loss of their child? If this is what it feels like to lose your dog, I could never survive that.

Then, it was guilt and blame. Did we miss the signs? Could we have prevented this? What if, what if, what if. Still.

I was thankful that we had Jack to cuddle but more importantly to force us  back to the forest and the beach.  We each had a good howl with him 2 days after you died. Cathartic acts for all of us.

Next came the existential thoughts. Life is so short. What is the purpose of my life?

How much you tried to teach me. You whole-heartedly threw your self, body and soul into everything you did. There is only now. Time to run? Run like hell. Time to relax? Find the  warmest spot and get yourself in the most comfortable position and let your jowls hang out. There is only now, and we should be doing something important like chasing balls or cuddling or enjoying whatever’s in the oven making those really good smells.

It was almost like you knew there was no time to waste. Life is so damn short! So I wondered: what am I doing that matters? What matters to me? Why do I procrastinate on this or that? How can I appreciate NOW and THIS more?

So I guess in writing this, I am trying to be more present to all the thoughts that have been milling around in my head. To acknowledge that even if I’m done crying every damn day, I still have some more tears to shed. I still miss you.

Thanks for the lessons and the memories.

“Dog Days” video by Joanne Probyn June 2009

I am so thankful to Christine, the queen of code monkeys, who helped me take the leap and has taught me immeasurable things.

I have learned so much in these 3 years. About web development, about myself, about handling clients, the joys and challenges of running my business, of working for myself at home. About starting new ventures.

It hasn’t been all sun & roses. It can be frustrating, scary, and lonely at times. I tend to work a lot more than I did at my corporate job. When you (mostly) love the work you do, that happens easily because it doesn’t all feel like work. On the flip side if I need to get out for a hike in the middle of the day, I often can.

Yet I can’t imagine giving it up for any traditional job. (Offer me one of those “best job in the world” gigs somewhere tropical for a year and I might change my tune ) I love being able to shape my direction, the freedom of my schedule, the variety of my clients and their projects.

Thank you to everyone who’s been so supportive of this journey!

To my husband who quietly brings me coffee or lunch (or makes me go take a nap) just when I need it…

To the clients who have such faith in me…

To the communities of the Sunshine Coast who’ve been so welcoming…

And my Twitter friends who give me a virtual water cooler and library and a good laugh…

A toast! Thank you!

This solution uses custom fields. Here’s a tutorial on custom fields in case you need it.

First, I took the code from Google Maps and put it into a custom field in my contact page.

Then I edited my theme by adding a bit of code into page.php, just after where the line which outputs my title. Yours would look something like this:
<h1>the title();</h1>

So after the title I inserted the following to get my custom field which I had called “floatright”:

$customField = get_post_custom_values("floatright");
if (isset($customField[0])) {
      echo '<div class="alignright">'.$customField[0].'</div>';
}

So basically that checks if I’ve set a value for that custom field in the current page, and if so it inserts the field wrapped in a div which is floated right.

Of course I could have just hard-coded the map into page.php when the page is “contact us”. But this is a flexible solution that could be used on other pages and for any item that we want to float over to the right. And, the client can update that map area if they want to later without breaking that wrapper HTML. If you’re savvy enough to do this on your own site you might just put the div into your custom field for even more flexibility.

Bright & Colourful:

Arbutus Coffee (Duncan Rawlinson a.k.a. thelastminute, flickr)

I just love the colour and simplicity in this. (justinknol, flickr)

In the Vintage & weird department:

Coffee + Spankings, vintage ad (seanbonner, flickr)

Coffee means pleasure, coffee means fun! (cowtools, flickr)

Coffee can bring the world to you! - vintage brochure imagery (cowtools, flickr)

Dedicated to the craft

Coffee Break (scarygami, flickr)

Old-time charm

London coffee shop (sheyne, flickr)

So, 5 hippie kids running around half naked all summer long need a lot of entertaining, right? What better than to send them all to the blackberry bushes surrounding the back yard!

Legend has it that one entire summer was filled with us little ones picking blackberries (and no doubt eating many before they hit the bowl) while Barbara put her food sciences training to use and perfected…

Barbara’s Blackberry Cobbler

In a bowl, cream together well:

• 3 tbsp soft butter
• ¾ cup white sugar

In another bowl, mix together:

• 1½ cups flour
• 2 tbsp baking powder
• ½ tsp salt

Add the dry mix to the creamed butter/sugar, alternately with 1 cup fresh or sour milk

Basically you end up with a kind of white cake batter. Spread that batter in a greased 9×12 pan (Mom says glass works best, I’ve never tried metal but I could see it being harder to clean).

• Spread 4 cups of berries on top
• Sprinkle ¾ cup sugar on top
• Pour approx 2 cups water over the berries (enough to cover them)

Finally, bake at 350 degrees about 45 minutes until brown on top.

Some of the cake will rise up between the berries, and the blackberry-water-sugar will make a kind of jelly-saucy stuff. Dee-lish.

Serve with vanilla ice cream.

Game to try it? Send me a picture of yours and I’ll post it here with a link to you, if you like. Otherwise I’ll post a photo next time I make one.

And as for that other recipe? That’s the one thing we’ll violently defend from poaching siblings around the dining table: Heather’s Cheesecake with Sour Cream Topping. You might have to talk me into sharing that one

MUTO: An ambiguous animation painted on public walls