etc.

An official snow day! I’m surrounded by white and rather enjoying it (especially my fragrant hyacinths).

Working from home means brewing good tea in a sterling silver strainer. Civilized!

You know how I’ve been complaining about being too busy to blog, craft, knit, breathe? Well, part of that busyness was due to this conference I’m at in Monterey at the moment. I know, poor me. It’s beautiful here, the weather has been marvelous, my preconference workshops went well, the rest of the conference is proceeding swimmingly, and (apart from the loss of one of my two camera batteries, grrr), life is just swell. Swell, I tell you, of the stress-free, I can breathe, life is good, and the world is a beautiful place variety. We’re recharging, oh yes, and what a perfect place to do it. Watch the Flickr photostream for photographic evidence and more stories soon.

Hello, Friday. The mister and I returned yesterday from a 2.5 day road trip to London, Ontario, where I spent 2.5 minutes introducing the course I’m teaching to a roomful of MLIS students, and where we spent the rest of our time tooling around campus and town, rediscovering some of our old haunts (we both graduated from Western and haven’t been back in nine years). More pictures here.

And now, pardon me, but I am off to turn this house upside-down, with broom and dustpan in one hand, and garbage bags in the other. I am determined to rid us of the junk and detritus that has been piling in our corners for too long, making me feel generally bogged down and sick with unease. Onward!

3 pounds of strawberries and a pitcher of homemade raspberry iced tea. Looks like summer to me.

Subtle red for this, the last day of colour week. This is my favourite fortune. I carry it with me, tucked in my coin purse, where I catch sight of it everyday, and it serves as a gentle reminder that there is beauty, potential, and inspiration in the most ordinary of things. I put it in a rusty white enamel bowl for this picture (the rusty bits are quite a brilliant red too, but they look remarkably brown here).

The last of the colour week favourites:

• Blue and Black, by Cotton Strudel
• red, by Snuffywump
• blue2, by Morran
• threshold, by two trees…with roots like these
• blue, by Max Arlo, Superhero
• june11_white2, by think pretty

And that’s just a few of the lovelies posted this week, more at Flickr. Thank you little birds & port2port for the inspiration! Now I’m off to blog elsewhere about a conference I’ve been at most of this past week that was inspiring in a different way entirely.

A happy Friday to you and you! And you, too.

A tiny slice of my studio for blue Thursday. Not a lot of blue, granted, but turquoise is a current fixation of mine (there’s ample evidence of this on my Flickr favourites page) and when I opened the door to my studio this morning, that splotch of dried blue paint caught my eye.

More favourites from this week of colour:

• brown3, by shash
• black & gray, by wisecraft
• Black/Grey, by Aunty Cookie
• gray/black wednesday, by little birds
• Colour week: wednesday, by hop skip jump

To-morrow, last day of colour week: red. This has been excellent fun!

Two of my very favourite things are black & gray. And here’s a bonus shot of my favourite black, because she’s notoriously difficult to photograph and I’m tickled that I managed a decent picture of her.

And now, rather than link to the same thing as yesterday (and the day before), here are a few of my favourite pictures from color week thus far:

• colorweek::white, by mommycoddle
• magnolia brown, by martha snail
• brown, by Max Arlo, Superhero
• white barrel, by Bella Dia
• brown, by SouleMama

To-morrow, blue. And more favourites.

A brown cow. I took this last weekend when we visited The Farm to celebrate the mister’s brother’s 40th birthday (happy birthday for to-morrow, Pete!). It’s not a working farm but they do have neighbourhood cows hanging out in their fields (heh, “neighbourhood cows”! Only in the country…) and this chap did not like it one bit that we got so close to his crib (hey, it is a working farm after all, I find out later). He stared us down the whole time. We’re city folk, the mister and I, so we giggled a lot (well, I giggled, the mister did not) and took a bunch of pictures.

More “color week” on Flickr.

Albeit bluish, here’s my contribution to “white” for colour week. I’m a big fan of white (and, yes, also neutrals) and tend to wear a lot of it during the summer. Especially white linen, this is one of three white linen shirts in my closet (and I will probably amass more white linen before the summer is through!). Thanks to Stephanie & Mav for the lovely & inspiring idea, more on “color week” is here and here. And it looks like “colorweek” is the Flickr tag of choice. (Update: colorweek2, actually.)

To-morrow, brown! (There’s a similar embarassment of brown linen in my closet but that would be a bit predictable, wouldn’t it?)