First Snowfall

I'm never quite prepared when it snows. No matter how I anticipate it or mentally gear myself up for it, it always takes me by surprise.









The weather report said that there'd be snow mixed with rain for Friday, when I first check it. It was the day b & I were to make a run to Vancouver. Thinking that this would be the first snowfall of the season, it wouldn't amount to much. Right.
Out from the Long Harbour ferry and onto Vancouver, the meteorologist Russ Lecate on news 1130 gave us the bad news. The snowfall would be pretty serious (for the greater Vancouver region anyway), 5cm of snow coming late that evening. Crikey! We take the 10:20 ferry home then. Not having dealt with a real winter since that crazy one 2 years ago, I couldn't get my head around his 5cm prediction and didn't think much about it. Hmmm....
At 11 pm we were still in the line-up waiting to be called onto the ferry home. The wind was whipping up and the snowflakes were getting bigger and more abundant. By the time we got to Salt Spring, it was pass midnight and the 5cm of snow had beat us to the island. Living in the 'Canadian Reviera' we don't have very many snowploughs and so the main road was icy and slippery. It was so treacherous that we didn't quite make it home. Had to park the car o the main road and walk up the hill. In the moonlight and the snow, the scene glowed with the luminous that only a foot of snow can give.

Making Punpkin Faces

I've never carved a pumpkin before. Enough episodes of Buffy & The Simpsons Halloween have convinced me that I wanted to at least make an attempt at one, even at this late juncture of my life. Not having grown up in a culture that celebrated Halloween, all this is new to me.

But, as with many things in my life right now, I learnt how to carve a pumpkin on YouTube. There were really elaborate designs of dragons and wizards and even Barbie, that you could download and print a template from. This, you could put on your pumpkin, trace out the design by pricking holes through the paper onto the pumpkin face and then start carving out the hollows with your sharp knife. After being thoroughly impressed and somewhat overwhelmed with all the choice, I chose the old way. I did what B did when he was a kid making pumpkin heads, I drew up a couple of faces on paper and then copied them with a Sharpie onto the big orange squash and I was ready to wield my chopper with the best of them.

First it was "OFF WITH THE Top of the HEAD!!!", then you scrape all the guts out. Seeds, juice and all. It was a great big messy affair and my weeks worth of newspapers couldn't contain the flinging, chopping and dripping pumpkin parts. Three days down the road, the house still smells of that squashy massacre.



I thought I'd have a practice pumpkin, a smaller one with easier lines.
As you can see, Munch would have been proud of my ode to his Scream. Of course I had to show my creation off.










All day on Halloween, my little screamie pumpkin head had his insides stuffed with dried Oak leaves and greeted the customers coming into the bookstore.



The next one was bigger and has a kind of sugar-high crazed vampire bat look to it. I mean, a pumpkin head had to be , at least, a little scary, right? I liked this too. The eye-balls were the trickiest to carve out.


Despite lighting both the heads and leaving the out on our deck on Halloween night, no trick-or-treaters came a- knocking. Good thing too. Because B & I couldn't resist and ate almost all the candy before nightfall....

My First Apple Harvest

Ok. There is no way to prepare a girl from Singapore for the sheer amazement of harvesting fruit from a tree in her own garden. I mean, with most Singaporeans living in flats, the best we can hope for is a few limes and a couple of chillies.
But here in Kampung Canada, on this little island called Salt Spring, I have two apple trees that I didn't plant or nurture that are bearing 40 to 50 apples just like that!
How fab is that? So, now I have to quickly brush up on all the apple-involved recipes I can find. Last week, I attempted an apple pie, and forgot to add the sugar to the dough till the last minute.
Suffice to say, the crust was, err, not very edible.


Still, there's always this week and some more apples to aid my journey to apple pie perfection. Fingers crossed.

Salt Spring is quite abundant with different types of apples which explains why we have a yearly Apple Festival on the island.
Looks to be a lovely country kampung sort of outing. Can't wait!

So we bought ourselves a bookshop

So we bought ourselves a bookshop.

It was a sudden thing, this life-changing switching of cities and of lifestyles.

But, if you know anything of my history, most of the important things that have happened in my life have happened this way.

This paraphrase pops into mind, “when the time is right, all obstacles melt away.”

It was sometime in January that B & I made the decision that Vancouver wasn't the place for us anymore. Two weeks later, we're taking a fog-shrouded ride on a BC Ferries, er... ferry, to Long Harbour on Salt Spring Island to check out a charming Fine Used bookshop called Sabine's, which had come onto the market a couple of months ago.


Three weeks later, we've decluttered, staged and sold the condo for it's asking price, giving us the money to put in a offer for the bookshop. And, as these stories go, the offer was accepted. We moved to the island in April and officially took over in May. And what a ride it's been!

Sabine's Fine Used Books is in the main village of Ganges, in a charming little shopping area called Grace Point, where there are art galleries, bistros, a spa, a yoga studio and a great jewellery shop called Frankly Scarlet.

The bookshop itself has a marvellous olde worlde feel about it with lots of woods and carpets like you seen in the libraries of period BBC programmes. Bookshelves stretching themselves from floor to ceiling and hugging you as you walk between the aisles.

Hundreds of books filling all two floors of the shop with antiquarian books from the 1800's to brand new reads like 'The Book of Negroes'. The first estate sale we went to we bought a beautiful black, green & gold leather bound set of Shakespeare's works which we sold in the summer for $450. It was a wonderful feeling to be able to turn a profit. Kinda like what Lovejoy does, it does!

The funny thing about Sabine's is the coincidence of the bookshop's name and that Nick Bantock, the author of the Griffin & Sabine books, came to live on the island. So it made all sorts of sense that Sabine, the original owner of the bookshop, joined up with Nick to create the Griffin Room. A special place on the upper floor for a great many things Nick Bantock. All his titles are here, including most of Nick's out-of-print pop-up books as well as his original prints and the drawers of strange & curious ephemera (like Indian court documents and old stamps).

Now, it's the autumn and 6 months since the move. Although the flood of summer tourists have eased up, the enthusiasm and optimism for this move to be islanders and bookshop owners hasn't abated. Wish us luck!

2011 Update| And now we have a Facebook Page. Check it out at http://www.facebook.com/blacksheepbookssaltspring

There are Wild Things in the Garden

For a city girl like me, living in a little cottage in the wood is a very novel thing. I'm not used to not having rows of street lamps leading me home, or not having a gate, a fence or a buzz code that separates my little world from the the rest of the world outside. Or indeed, to have to burn wood for heat instead of just turning the thermostat knob for an instant gas fire to pop to into life. But the thing that really bowls me over, every minute, is the nearness of nature. Just next to the house, not 10m away is the woods.
There's a walking trail that is so overgrown I wouldn't have recognised it if my neighbour & landlady, Penny, hadn't pointed it out. Everywhere I look are trees. The straight & upfight Fir, the over green & over abundant Pine and the picturesquely scarggly Arbutus.
And then there's the quiet. Quiet enough to hear the wind caressing trees, the bees buzzing and the somewhat oddly regular crunching of leaves?

A curious sound that I just had to investigate.

Looking into the trees
I saw the most wonderful sight.

A couple of deer had wandered into
the garden below our deck
and without so much as a by your leave,
were grazing on the grass & shrubs.

I snuck across the deck to its edge to have a closer look, taking the greatest care to make as little noise as possible so as not to scare them. It was the closest I've come to a creature of the wild (unless you count Minke the demon cat, who is, by the way, getting more feral, if that were possible). It was magic! Then, I heard the loud Putt Putt puttering of a car coming down the road and was afraid the deer would run away and hide and my magic moment would come to an end. But no. Those deer continued with their veggie & daffodil buffet unperturbed (so much for the Ford Escape Hybrid commercials).
What's more they, made themsleves at quite home and plonked their ample tushes down under the dappled shade of a large Fir tree then proceeded with their after lunch nap.







I guess this city girl still has a lot to learn about the country kampung life.

Moving to Salt Spring Island

When I was a little girl, moving houses was always looked forward to. It was something rare & exciting. It was a welcomed change in routine, exploring new rooms and a new neighourhood. It was looking out new windows and seeing the world in a whole new light.
I guess moving houses then you're an adult isn't that much different. Except for the mountains of stuff you have to pack, ship & then unpack. You tend to amass stuff as you go down the road of life. I do at least. These days, I am learning to buy less and reuse more these. Not so much because I'm trying to be green (which I do try, and now living on Salt Spring has forced me to) but more so that I'll have less to lug around when the next move comes along.

So, in early April, we did the BIG move to from Burnaby, in the Metro Vancouver area, to Salt Spring Island. For those scratching their heads trying to figure out just where this Pulau Air Asin is, let me enlighten. It's part of the Southern Gulf Island group which is sandwiched between Vancouver Island & mainland North America. And because the move involved catching two ferries and travelling over 150km (slightly further than Mersing is from Singapore), we had to do it over two days.
Day one was to pack the huge 5 tonne Budget truck, which our friend Milan heroically drove. After we crammed our possessions into the truck, I could see that we were in serious trouble. We had more stuff than we had space. Which simply meant that all that couldn't be stuffed in the cars had to be left behind or thrown away.That's when I resolved to learn to live with less because of the nail-pullingly painful decisions on what we had to leave behind.

The next day started bleary-eyed at 4am to travel from the skypad we has sold to catch the first ferry on the first leg of our move. Horseshoe Bay in West vancouver to Nanaimo on Vancouver island. Then the hour drive to Crofton to catch the local ferry to Vesuvius Bay on Salt Spring. Everything went without a hitch. Even Minke, the demon cat behaved. Not a single peep, or sound or crumpling of the steel door of her transport box.
We were lucky, as we have been since coming to the island. The sun was out and nothing got wet. Only a few bumps & scrapes on the furniture.
Evening saw many familiar boxes & furniture jumbled about in an unfamiliar wooden house. Our new home is a cottage in the woods in a place called Trincomali heights. And we are settled. At least for this year.