In my summer garden. Double tiger lily, early August morning.
A slightly surreal moment yesterday when a friend mentioned in passing that he had been reading the blog. He smiled as he said it and gave a nod. It sounded like he felt that was a good thing, but it took me totally by surprise and left me momentarily at a loss for an appropriate response. I murmured something about not posting much these days, he replied understandingly with a “Yes, summer…” and that’s where it ended.
I have mixed feelings about knowing that people I know In Real Life are also familiar with My Online Life. Not that I’m hiding anything, dear friends and neighbours, but knowing you are reading these posts does give me pause. I wonder why?
My husband reads many of my posts, usually over my shoulder as they’re being tapped out in the early morning and during daytime tea breaks. I’ve overheard him telling people about my blogging, which I must confess makes me cringe as if this were something to be ashamed of, to be hidden.
In Real Life I am secretly, painfully shy. I’m the appreciative listener at social gatherings rather than the holder-forth. It’s recently become rather trendy to self-identify as an introvert, and our socially awkward tribe has been getting some positive press, but all cute Facebook questionnaires and celebrity confessions aside, there are those of us who think better in solitude, and who enjoy the slower but possibly more forgiving process of communicating in print rather than in think-on-the-go face-to-face chat. (Before the internet we kept journals. And wrote letters. Well, I guess we still do, though the media has changed.)
Writing about my reading gives me great pleasure, and I hope reading these posts gives something of the same degree of pleasure to all of you. It’s good to feel that one is a small cog in the vast machinery of this ongoing bookish discourse, sharing an interest with (mostly) unseen others.
Moving on…
A few of the doomed rudbeckia and plume poppies in my under-the-eaves flowerbed just before the ladders moved in. Early August, 2015.
Half of the roof is now off our house. Three large tarps are keeping the rain from pouring in, and of course it has been raining just enough to keep things interesting.
This is the summer’s Great Big Project, changing our roofline to something more extreme to allow for better snow slide in winter, and replacing the aging metal sheathing with newer, better cladding which should outlast our time in residence. (Unless of course we both make our centuries aging-in-place, at which point I expect that these sorts of worries will be capably dealt with by others in our lives.)
It’s a massive job, and in our consistent tradition of never hiring anything out that we can do ourselves (and this covers all aspects of our lives except for things such as medical and dental visits, and haircuts, and removing/replacing tires from/on wheel rims, which my husband can do but absolutely hates so we patronize a tire shop for that particular job) we are plugging away all by ourselves.
The two of us with the priceless help of our absolutely wonderful nineteen-year-old daughter have to date built 58 roof trusses, have removed the old roofing and rafter sheathing, porch pillars and roof and rafters, and eaves and soffit and miscellaneous other stuff (there are certainly a lot of pieces in a house, as daughter rather redundantly pointed out with frustrated passion during one of her countless trips up and down the ladder), and are now in the process of putting it all back together.
We’re weeks and weeks behind when we’d hoped to be finished because of course that’s the way these sorts of things go. We’ve had to accommodate “real” work (you know – for wages), all sorts of weather, and various other pressing issues. (Including some marvelous travelling-for-pleasure, so it’s not all been “poor us” by a long shot.)
And now with a quarter of the trusses up in place, we can at last truly visualize the finished project.
It will, when done, be wonderful. No more scary sessions shovelling snow off the darned thing, no more leaks.
I should really be documenting this project in photos, but I haven’t yet taken a single one. I should remedy that, because once this is over it will all be a blur, as we move inexorably on to the next thing on the project list.
Ah, well. Onward and upward. (Quite literally. Did I mention my desperate level of discomfort with heights? Confronting that fear on a daily basis; I should come away from this episode a better person. Or something! 😉 )
Happy summer, all.
Russian yellow hollyhocks, rising sun. Early August 2015.
Leaves & Pages 
I felt the same way and so used a pen name for my old blog, which led to the very odd experience of having a few acquaintances, who had no idea I was the author, recommend that I read it! I admitted I wrote it, with a feeling of pride mixed with horror because I really had enjoyed being anonymous.
Like you, I kind of keep my blogging and real life separate. The family and a few friends know, of course, and sometimes dip in. I just find it easier talking relatively anonymously! And well done with all the work – sounds monumental!
I share your feeling about heights. Would much rather be the one who hands up the tools. Even trusses! Those are beautiful hollyhocks…
I don’t think I told anyone about my blog for two years after I started it. Even now, my family know about it and a handful of friends but none of them ever read it. Perhaps the upside of having a non-bookish circle?
Just taking the opportunity to say how much I enjoy your blog, it’s one of my favorites. The books you choose are either those I love or have never heard of; your take on them is something I can relate to, with a similarity of feeling that makes me nod “Yes!”; and I like your rating system too! I have a connection, affinity and love for Canada, but don’t live there, so your blog also serves to share a little of the Canadian life with me. Personally I have overcompensated for innate shyness (as can happen), so I can identify with both the shy and the pushy. Our lives are so different – I live in the city (Los Angeles), in a pair of apartments by the beach, and have never so much as had a garden in my liife – I fulfil my longing for nature, peace and greenness by hiking and loving wildflowers. But at the same time I’ve absorbed the Los Angeles movie business ethos enough so that when you mention that you have a tradition of never hiring out what you can do yourself, I laughed out loud – for I never do a single thing if I can help it, but hire others! This has left me rather helpless, ignorant of how to do anything but read and write…but there you are, able and willing to do all sorts of beautiful and useful things, and yet you are also a wizard mistress of reading and writing! So cheers to you from one who always looks forward to “Leaves & Pages.”
Coming from a very clumsy and unskilled family, I am in awe of your home construction.
I was so excited when I started my blog, and rather proud of it – so I was disappointed that my siblings ignored it so completely, particularly in the days before people started reading it and it felt a bit lonely. One sister did ask if I really read all those books, which was a bit depressing.
Oh, I so sympathize with you. I feel anxious when real-life people know about my blog — I think at least partly because I hate the idea that they might think that I’m demanding they read it (when nothing could be further from the truth!). When it comes up, I talk around it and swiftly change the subject.
Beautiful photos. I so admire you tackling such a big project on your own, we did a lot in our old house but we wouldn’t have tackled the roof.
I feel very uncomfortable when anyone mentions my blog, in fact it’s only very recently that I told my siblings about it, after about six years of blogging.
I also cringe with embarrassment when my husband mentions my blog to people. Your roof project sounds very ambitious! I’ve thought about changing our roof line as well–we have a shallow sloped hipped roof that doesn’t allow room to expand into the attic. Good luck with your project!
This is a collective THANK YOU for all of the wonderful comments above. Sorry not to have responded sooner – just after I posted we had to disable our internet service while the satellite dish which channels in our internet feed was being moved, due to the roof project under discussion. The technician came out yesterday and recalibrated everything, so we’re back online and playing catch up. 🙂
I loved reading this because it is something we bloggers have in common. I’ve thought often that if I had a friend in ‘real life’ who wrote a blog, it would be the first thing I’d look at each morning. A couple of my friends read my ‘letters’ but not regularly, not interestedly (if that’s a word, and if you know what I mean). My most faithful reader is my mother-in-law. She praises me in emails whenever I write. It is quite, quite wonderful and brings tears to my eyes. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about blogging and Facebook. I may do a post sometime. Fb is so ephemeral. Sometimes what I read yesterday, I can’t even find anymore. It is a quick, fun way to see pictures, etc. but there’s no depth, no soul as there is in blogging. I love the slowness, the quietness, the thinking involved in blogging, both writing mine and reading others. I, too think better in solitude. I feel I am more my real self when no one is around.
Oh yes, Nan. This is so much what I feel, too. I do use Facebook, but it’s very much an ephemeral sort of contact with others. Lovely for pictures, and an easy way of keeping up with what’s going on with others, but not the venue for thoughtful discourse. The time spent reading blog posts, and writing my own, feels much more better spent – so much more real.