Small world

The other day, I was telling a teammate at an ultimate game how excited I was about being asked to sub for a friend’s volleyball team the next day. In turn, she got excited and asked if she could add me to the subs list of her own volleyball team. Of course! I love wolley-ball! And then our conversation took an interesting turn:

Me: Where do you play?

Her: Location X.

Me: Oh, really? I have a friend who was going to join the league there as a single [as in, someone who doesn't have a team yet but would like to join an existing one if there are spots available] there. I don’t know what night she plays though…

Her: What’s her name?

Me: FirstName.

Her: FirstName what?

Me: FirstName LastName.

Her: Oh. I picked her up off the singles list this season.

Me: *Blink. Blink**Cricket*

Two people who I never would have thought would have crossed paths, and yet here they are, playing on the same team. Not that they’re so different, but it just doesn’t occur to me to think of people from two different groups of friends as friends, in turn. I think for most people, various groups of friends are compartmentalized by nature – so it’s always a surprise when two friends from separate groups turn out to know each other. Ottawa in particular seems to be a smaller world than other cities I’ve lived in, and it’s not the first time I’m surprised by who turns out to know whom else.

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Summertime

Wow. So much for posting pictures as I go through them. I haven’t even gotten anywhere close to going through pictures after the first few days!

Part of it is my fault – back in the depths of winter, I’d bought a groupon-like deal for a photo album printing. “I’ll go through my pictures from my big Asia trip or our honeymoon”, I thought to myself, “and do it as a trial run before we leave for our trip. You know, so once we come back, I’ll be better at slapping together an album about the new trip”. Yeeeeah, that didn’t quite happen as planned. For whatever reason, I didn’t get around to doing it before we left – which meant that after we got back, I had 2 weeks to use the groupon before it expired. And there’s no way I would let it expire! So instead of sorting through new pictures, I had a very long walk down memory lane to sort through very old pictures. Only to pull out gems like this one.

Or this.

Or this.

See, I’m giving you pictures. Just not from the current trip.

I’d like to say we’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming now that this album is out of the way, but I’m no longer so optimistic. The garden is still a fair bit of work – weeds everywhere! budding zucchini! lemons!

Wait, what? Isn’t Ottawa a bit too harsh to be growing lemons, you may be wondering? Not if you’re growing them as an indoor-outdoor plant! For the first time ever, I saw the gardening centre at Loblaws selling meyer lemon trees – and given my love of lemon curd, I just couldn’t resist the promise of making it out of my own lemons. We’ll see how that works out.

I’ve also started biking to work, although I’m desperately out of shape. Ultimate season is in full swing, which is helping me get back in shape rather quickly. Games in 34 degree weather with a 44-degree humidex will help anyone with their training goals!

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Back from the other side of the world

I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth, I promise. Just off the face of this continent for a while. In fact, life has been pretty exciting – we’ve been on vacation! 4 at times fun, exploratory, exciting, and relaxing weeks – sometimes more than one of those together.

I’ve learned a few things on that trip, as well. Like the fact that being away for all of May when you have a house and a large yard? Baaaaaaaaaaad idea. When we came back, the yard looked like a jungle. I’ve slowly been hacking away at it over the last week, and finally feel like I’m making some progress. It doesn’t help that I planted some mail-order plants/bulbs before leaving, and now whenever I’m weeding, I always have to wonder whether this small plant I’m looking at is a weed or something new I planted and then forgot about… my approach so far has been that if I see it in multiple places, far removed from each other (like the front and back yard), it’s likely to be a weed. Especially if I also see it in the vegetable garden.

My seedlings this year didn’t fare too well (see: monthlong absence; major laundry-room project), so I went out on the weekend and bought some nursery tomatoes and peppers. *hang head in shame* Oh well, there’s always next year. And the garlic, beans, and zucchini I’d managed to get in the ground before leaving are doing pretty well. As are the chives (I think) which are mysteriously growing in the walkway cracks near the shed. Huh?

Of course, as if the yardwork is not enough, there are (gigabyte-sized) piled of photos to sort through. I’m aiming at half an hour a night spent organizing and eventually editing those, but even this may be a dream. So hold tight for the photos. I promise they’re coming. I just need to get them edited and take the best bits from my travel journal for the writeups. In the meantime, I might share snippets like these every few days as I’m working on them. Reliving my vacation every time I attack the photos makes the process that much more bearable. Like thinking that not a quarter of an hour after this photo was taken we had deliciously frosty beers on one of those balconies overlooking the bay… maybe that white one stuck between two blue ones, in the left third of the photo?

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