Lately round here

Hi everyone,What a difference a day made. And then a week!This is the sun the day after my last post and smoke rolled into Vancouver from the interior, Washington and Oregon wildfires.Yikes!This was the state of the world at 10 am.I'll tell you something though, although the smoke was awful to smell, the red sunlight was magical. Like living on Mars.Look at my pristine city!It was so strange seeing it enveloped in a smokey haze.I must admit that while it was a little surreal, it was a little romantic as well.But it didn't last long. A few days later, some rain and a good westerly wind and Vancouver felt much fresher.It's been nice to be back home in Vancouver after three months away.The summer's been very dry and I've been busy trying to water the gardens.The bees are loving the autumn crocus right now.My neighbour has sold her house in 10 days for over $2 million to a construction company and that means a new duplex next door.That is the state of real estate round here.I'm not thrilled about that and must admit I now have moments of seriously thinking about moving out of this neighbourhood.It's ridiculous to think I'm going to be the only single detached house in a block of duplexes. The only problem is the minute I sell this house it will be bulldozed over and all this beautiful Craftsman heritage will be lost. There is a company who moves homes though, so I might just investigate that option. Wouldn't it be cool to move one's home onto some lovely plot of land? Hmm.Well, in the meantime...and it will probably take a full year for the company who bought the house to get their permits in order...I've managed to snag all my neighbour's sky blue bearded irises!Robbie has been helping me with some projects.One thing is he has stained and varnished a shelf we built several years ago for under the window in the family room. It tops off the custom bookshelves.I love the deep rich wood grain which has come out of this piece of inexpensive pine.The other thing I snagged from my neighbour is her, much better than mine, 3 compost containers, AND the compost! And the cement tiles for underneath.The plastic pot is for collecting plastic bags which I use in the kitchen compost bucket for holding fruit and veg waste till I get it into the bins. Later, I just pick up all the used plastic bags and take them to the recycling depot at once. Yes, I know I shouldn't really be using plastic bags to line the kitchen compost bucket. I'm working on it.But doesn't this little corner of my garden looks great and organised now?I love it.We've really been hanging close to home lately, and also probably because of jet lag and I turned my ankle again! (Darn skater's ankles!)But we did pop down to the Shipyards night market last night for supper.This is actually only the second night market I managed to get to this year and the season only has two more Fridays to go.We came down for the sunset.And the fish and chips.We really felt like having fish and chip.The HMCS Ottawa was in port.We sat on the pier, watched the city sparkle and took in the people watching and activity around us.Then we stayed into the night listening to the band and Robbie did some dancing with the crowd.At one point he had the whole dancing crowd dancing back and forth and then he started dancing around them all!Today, being the last sunny day forecasted, we decided to drive out into the country and have some lunch at Fort Langley.The traffic slowed down on the highway for some emergency vehicles and for a few minutes, we had this beside us! So cute!I really love being in the country and especially in autumn.We looked around at our lunch options at the Fort and everything was packed to the max.We finally got a table at Wendel's Bookstore and Cafe and had a lovely lunch.Then a little mooch around the new stores.My goodness Fort Langley os growing at an alarming rate.Pretty soon the country is going to be the new city!Here are a few things we found:Chloe loved these charming pillows.I loved this calendar.And these huge wooden beads.Well, that's it for now.