Happy Victoria Day Weekend

While the new shop opens into the south laneway, which I hope most of you will come and see one day, the warehouse and office, as well as our apartment open out into a courtyard. It's a bit secluded, and you have to enter through a bit of a tunnel, but when you get into the courtyard, it's actually quite bright. It gets busy from time to time, although not so much after hours, as a lot of the businesses enter and exit through here. One of the strangest things about this courtyard is that in the middle of all this pavement, there is a tiny tree sprouting. You can see it leaning just ever so slightly for some of that delicious sunlight.

  I'm sure it will eventually start wreaking havoc on the foundation of the building, and soon enough, handyman Latif will come with some hack saw and it will be gone, but while it's here, what a lovely thing to see. It's been a busy last couple of weeks, and while the renovations by the contractors have come to a halt, as they should over this holiday weekend, we took a break from the unpacking, furniture assembling, sorting and e-mails to re-pot some of our plants. I used to have a classroom with a wall full of bright windows, and a million plants that grew and sprouted new little plants and it was a beautiful thing. Over the last few years, however, with the business and moving to the west end into a darker house and the baby, I admit to having let some of my plants taper off into a shrivelled oblivion. It has, in fact, been around three years since I re-potted any of the plants, although it looked like it could have been twenty based on their not-healthy-basically-dying leaves. Here in this new place, however, there is space and light and and some fresh new soil for some of these tiny, green and growing things. Some of these plants are from former students or from years and years ago, and I'm glad they've had the constitution to stay alive until I could pay attention to them again.

  Soil was spilled, one pot broken, and many plants received a second chance they thought they might never have again before going off to plant heaven. For once, you can't see the ink on my fingers, although it's mostly because it's covered by dirt.

Who needs a playground when you can sit on pavement! What fun this is! Eating dirt and pulling plant leaves off!

It was great to take a break, although I think Jon was unimpressed that by "break" I meant "please help me move all these plants from here to there and then here and then back again. And now I need water." We'll all be back at work soon enough, but I hope you all had a wonderful long weekend. After a long winter, I could drink this sun forever. The shop is almost there, and here's hoping to seeing you soon :)