brittania yacht club, originally uploaded by mintyfresh.

yay hooray! we passed the final bits of our sailing course, and we’re ready to move on to bigger and better things, like sail-sharing, and actually spending time on the water not practicing anchoring drills a billion times.

In highlights, today, I reversed a sailboat around a buoy. Sounds easy, no? Wrong!

Our instructor, Jim, appears to live on and off of boats everywhere, and can soon be seen helping to crew the tallship Mist of Avalon into Halifax Harbour for the Tall Ships festival that starts in mid July. Crewing a tall-ship is hard work, but since they have a ship cat (!) it can’t be all that bad.

zukes, originally uploaded by mintyfresh.

since we live in a house with a backyard, I’m very keen to grow green things this year. Trouble is, the backyards owners are coming back, at least eventually, and I’d feel guilty tearing up their long-established “we love it!” garden to plant veggies. So we’re making do with pots and pots of things, like white zucchini (blossoms pictured above), a lettuce monster that just keeps giving lettuce, no matter how much we take away and lots more.

There’s something special about watching things grow from tiny shrively plants. Maybe I notice it more this year, spending all my days inside a windowless office (sometimes I don’t see daylight for 8 hours or more!), but I’m excited to come home every night to see what happened on the porch that day.

For now, it’s all flowers and no food. But that’s going to change…soon.

new blurb books!, originally uploaded by mintyfresh.

finally getting around to “publishing” some photos of our travels. China is by far the thickest, weighing in at a hefty 144 pages. They arrived today and I couldn’t wait more than thirty seconds to rip open the package (I tried! But failed.)

I do love blurb, and I love them more now that they have a large-format square book. Now to just take more awesome medium-format photos to fill them with.