Nurtured by Love

Category: Family Matters

Front Room

Old plaster-and-lath, upside-down receptacle and gaping fir flooring in the front room.

Oh look. I did some things. The front bedroom was uninhabitable when we took possession of the Nelson house. Over the summer Noah, Sophie and friends stripped and then repainted the two gyproc walls, but the ceiling was flaky acoustic tile and two of the walls were this stuff: plaster and lath with a bit of vermiculite behind it, being held together by many layers of paint, wallpaper and press-board panelling. At the suggestion of our building inspector we chose not to investigate asbestos status but simply to leave everything intact and seal it off. The safest way, really. So I cleaned loose plaster away, shimmed the places where it was gone completely and got the walls passably flat.

New drywall, and electrical receptacle now right-side-up

Then I drywalled over it. The ceiling required ten-foot sheets. Chuck and I did those together with a single step-ladder and, among other things, a baseball bat. Not too many corners (or arms or toes) got damaged.

I actually kind of like taping and mudding drywall. Not that I’d want to do that for a living, but a single room is a gratifying project. I’ve done it before, but it had been years. I got better at it as I went. In the end I didn’t get obsessive and do a full skim coat, since the two walls that had been done by a previous owner weren’t perfect either. But I got a pretty decent finish in the end.

Walls painted, hickory flooring and moldings done.

From there it was on to painting. I went with what was marketed as a sort of chic tan-grey but turned out to be not that far off the colour of raw drywall, but whatever. Neutral, so that redecorating won’t require repainting, since we’re not really sure what this room will be for over the medium-term, and may not own the house for all that long anyway.

Then the flooring went in. That was really fun. I had picked up enough surplus engineered hickory via the regional buy & sell website for a nice price. I floated it over an underlayment, gluing the tongue-and-groove together, staggering the joints. It took me about 5 hours, and this was where the room really began to pop for me. Adding the mouldings was a time-consuming final step but brought everything up to the next level.

Looking the other way, mountain dusk in the distance.

Sophie liked the room enough to move into it, vacating the larger, slightly more private room on the other side of the house. Which prompted Fiona to move across into the now-empty “blue room” that had been Sophie’s. All of which is good because it means that the room she was in, which Noah repainted during the summer, is now empty and can get a bunch of finishing details done. Then I can move into that, meaning the entire upstairs will be empty and we can start looking towards a major renovation up there in the spring. The plan for upstairs is to add a dormer with a bathroom in it, and turn the rest into a master bedroom. The extra bathroom is definitely needed in a house with four bedrooms. Last weekend during the choral festival we had Sophie’s friend plus four billets staying with us. The eight of us had enough space, but sharing one bathroom eight ways was nuts. The girls were great about it but … yeah, it was crazy.

November 10, 2015
Summer, here and gone

It was an early summer. The trees were greening up a good 3-4 weeks earlier than usual, and the season continued to unfurl early. The lake got “warm” (as warm as it ever does) in June. The wildfires were burning by the end of June. The huckleberries peaked in mid July. The wildflowers up Idaho peak were over before August began. And here it is September 2nd and the ‘late’ apples, pears and prune plums are ripening, the rains have socked in and the leaves are turning.

Symphony on the Mountain

And there has been a lot of water under the bridge. My mom came to visit. She’s really struggling with her rheumatoid arthritis, but a bit of prednisone helped take the edge off while she was here. She was able to be here when Erin performed a repeat of her grad recital locally. It was wonderful for us all to hear the maturity her playing has these days. She played the Debussy Sonata, Beethoven Sonata No. 7 and the Bach C Major solo sonata. She and I did the Symphony on the Mountain gig together in Kimberley. Kind of fun, and nice for me to get back to doing some symphony playing.

Fiona changed violin teachers. Although she really liked her previous teacher as a person, maybe the relationship was too casual: she just wasn’t feeling the drive to impress her, and maybe there was some trust lacking as well. She has had three lessons with the new teacher, and has said “She’s a little bit intimidating at first, but really nice, and she’s seasoned. You can tell she really knows what she wants, and how to explain it to me.” The new teacher is the one Erin went to for part of a year, who had to suddenly stop teaching when her husband got cancer. He’s well now, and she has returned to teaching in a very limited under-the-radar fashion. Fiona is one of three or four regular students she has. So far so good. We’ll get properly underway in a couple of weeks.

Ballet-specific physio

There has been physiotherapy. It has gone well. The tendons healed. The strength and flexibility have been very much compromised, though. There were several therapy sessions and lots of daily exercises prescribed. We had to drive to Spokane to get new pointe shoes and she’s now beginning some re-training exercises en pointe at home. She’s signed up for three two-hour days a week of ballet this year. Hopefully she’ll know enough to avoid pushing too hard as she comes back from this. She’s young and they start the year gradually: she’ll probably be fine. Gymnastics may be harder to approach as carefully.

The Uphill Cruiser, in progress: waiting on rubber and wicker

I started building a city bike, rehabilitating the Stumpjumper I bought in 1989 to try to get a couple of years of life out of it toodling around Nelson. I figure the mountain-climbing gears will be essential climbing 10% grades with payload. Eventually I hope to get an e-bike, but that’s hard to justify now when most of my travel is to transport kids.

Helping out at Dance Camp

Fiona wasn’t able to do dance camp, but she ended up being the teacher’s assistant at both the Music Explorers and age 6-11 dance camp. She was amazingly hard-working, helpful, pro-active and mature. Put in long days … up to 6 hours straight without any real break, herding children, helping with activities, doing prep and clean-up, redirecting problematic behaviour, supervising for safety.

Sophie and Noah have spent most of the summer in Nelson at the Mill St. house. Sophie has been working full-time at a café. She’s taken up longboarding. She’s got herself a twice-weekly paper delivery route. She shops, she cooks, she cleans, she’s been taking a Spanish course. She’s a maniac hard worker. Noah has spent much of the summer getting cold after cold, and when not sick playing D&D with his Nelson friends until the middle of the night. He’s also done some renovation and cleaning work on the Mill St. house. Spackling, washing everything with TSP, painting, carpet-underlay scraping, all that fun stuff.

SVI Play-in

SVI happened. It was over-the-top busy for me. Delegation is not my strong point. But Erin and Fiona were very helpful, and overall things ran smoothly. We had 95 students this year, the most ever, and with my grip on a local team of volunteer-parents slipping away now that I don’t teach locally, I struggled even more with asking for help. I managed to delegate one area, with rather less success than might have been due to my inability to relinquish control, but there is plenty of “room to grow” as they say.

We went to Ontario to visit my family and Chuck’s family. All six of us went, a miracle of planning and lucky timing. Erin was completing a Suzuki teacher training course in Waterloo, so we intercepted her there and managed visits here and there.

I biked as much as I could. The new bike has been fabulous. I got much stronger over time and decided there was no need for a bigger sprocket or smaller chainring. I just bought a used trainer, a Cycle Ops Fluid 2, and plan to keep riding in the garage even through worst of the fall rains and winter conditions. I have my iPhone rigged up on the aero bars for reading books. Also in the plans is a two-day Silvery Slocan bike ride, from one home to the other and back again.

And there’s been a bit of trail-running and mountain biking and alpine hiking. Not as much as any of us wished, but Fiona’s limited ambulatory capacity has put a bit of a crick in our style.

But there: that’s some of it anyway. And so we move onwards into fall.

September 2, 2015
Orange is the new black

So we got a new vehicle. Compared to the old one it’s less boxy, less black, cuter and smaller. It’s also less backwards, having the steering wheel on the left, a fact that makes my three (yes three!) kids with Learner’s Permits much happier. I think that we now have some hope of actually getting one or two of them to the next stage of licensure.

The new car is a five-seater Subaru CrossTrek. Now that we’re rarely a family of six, or even five, we no longer needed the passenger space the Delica offered. Since the Deli was reaching its 21st birthday and beginning to show its age, we decided to opt for something newer, smaller and more fuel-efficient. I love the CrossTrek so far. It gets an extra 160 km from a tank of fuel compared to the Delica (and it was actually pretty good) and has the high ground clearance and AWD that are necessities where we live. Furthermore it has all sorts of nice safety features like airbags, ABS and traction control, things that are pretty standard these days but which the Deli was missing.

So we’re a three-L family, and I think we’ll be hard-pressed to share the driving experience out over the holidays. By rights Erin and Noah should already by onto the next stage in the graduating licensing, but it hasn’t happened. I really don’t know what it is about this generation that they don’t relish getting their driver’s licenses the way my generation did. It may be that this is regional, and that in other parts of the country it’s different. But here, there doesn’t seem to be a headlong dash towards learning to drive the instant kids turn 16. A few kids, sure, they’re in a hurry but a lot seem to have no interest. For my kids and the majority of their friends it’s just not a priority.

I wonder about a few factors. First, the graduated license program, which I completely understand the reasoning behind, has had the effect of pushing full licensure out of the high school years. In BC if you move quickly, you can have a partial license as early as your 17th birthday, but full licensure (meaning being able to carry more than one passenger without restrictions on time of day, etc.) has to wait until well into legal adulthood. So driving just isn’t part of the high school culture. Kids don’t see their slightly older friends enjoying the perks of being fully licensed, encouraging them to look forward to becoming so themselves.

Then there are the economic constraints. When I was 17, gas cost 23 cents a litre. Around here we’ve been paying more than five times that much. Inflation only accounts for about half that change. So cars are more expensive to buy, insure, fill and maintain, even taking inflation into account, and higher education costs more than ever. How likely is it that a university-bound young adult these days will own a car? Not very!

And then there’s other fallout of the graduated licensing system: it makes it expensive and inconvenient for teens to get enough practice to prior to doing their road tests, since (at least in our case) they’ve moved away from home by the time they’re age-eligible. Living in big cities, with ample public transit, thankfully, on shoestring budgets and with no access to a family vehicle, they are mostly limited to few weeks of rural driving in the summer to get the driving experience and confidence they need to do their first road test.

(I should say that I have a similar beef with the practice in some jurisdictions of pushing the legal drinking age well into adulthood — particular as old as 21. It means that it’s difficult for parents to provide support and guidance as their offspring venture forth into these new areas of responsibility. Hey kids, there’s something we think carries a bit of risk, so we’re not gonna let you try it until you’re a bit older and completely on your own.)

Finally, for my kids at least, there’s the fact that they’ve had a lot of autonomy and independence already. Erin travelled to SE Asia, and took herself to Alberta once a month when she was 14 and 15. Noah went to Cuba as well as various other Canadian locations with his choir and has couch-surfed a bit in Nelson. Sophie’s already living on her own a few days a week. All three kids made their own educational choices, whether as unschoolers or by choosing to attend school. Maybe a driver’s license doesn’t have the same symbolic value for them as a marker of the passage into independence and autonomy.

At any rate, it’s not part of high school culture because you now have to be older, and that makes getting enough learn-to-drive experience is awkward and expensive, and my kids have already got a fair bit of independence, so what’s the big deal with driving? Why bother to learn? In our case if you then add the disincentive of learning in a boxy high van with the steering wheel and controls all on the wrong sides and you’ll understand why we’re all stuck at the L stage here.

It turns out it may be Sophie pushing the older siblings forward here. She turned 16 recently, got her L and has actually seen the wisdom in knocking off as much of the learn-to-drive process as she can while she’s still living at home, even if the payoff may end up being many years down the line. Perhaps several years after graduating from university she’ll finally having enough income to buy her own car, and won’t have to pay to take a several-months-long Driving School course at that point.

She’s pushed herself past the “freakin’ stressed out” stage of being behind the wheel and is now to the point of enjoying our lonely rural drive back and forth from Nelson. She’s getting experience with all kinds of weather and is learning to keep her eyes peeled for black ice and deer eyes glinting in the dark. What she’s not getting enough of yet is dealing with traffic patterns in city environments, but Nelson is big enough that she’ll accrue that over time.

December 16, 2014