Fond Farewell

I had always intended to write this post before we left Vancouver, but it just never quite felt like the right time. I'm not sure if there ever really is one right time to do things, but after my first real bout of missing Vancouver yesterday and sprucing up the blog a bit I figured now was as good as ever. So, Hello! Good to be back.

We were really lucky to be able to do a few trips around B.C. before we left Canada, and looking through my photos of the Gulf Islands and moody Francois Lake mountains has both made my heart ache and made me feel really, really lucky that I got to call that spectacular country home for awhile. There is something special about the Pacific Northwest, with it's thick forests and mossy, damp smell that lingers even into the summer months. It gets under your skin.

I love that our last couple of months in and around Vancouver were full of exploring, spending time with friends and a whole lot of joy. Leaving was always in the back of my mind, but I never felt really sad because each place we went was so beautiful, and each meal shared so full of laughs. It wasn't until flying out of Vancouver airport and peering out the window, mesmerized once again by the Coast Mountains that it really hit me, and I cried and cried. I think I found myself in Vancouver in just that perfect time in my life that made not just my growing up but the city itself have a really strong impact on the person I am. Does that sound a bit dramatic? In some ways I don't feel like I've changed hugely in the last 5 years, but in so many ways I have and whenever I catch a glimpse of those dang mountains I'm reminded of a place where I really felt free to be and grow into the person I wanted to be. Vancouver, with your crazy weather, hippies, large amount of active-wear and pot smell, you still have my heart.

So, it has been a bit of a tough transition. There have been a few hiccups along the way which I'll go into in a later post, but we have been lucky enough to come home to a New Zealand summer, which is just about one of the best things in the world. Watching the sun set over Lake Taupo with my Dad on our first night home, eating fish (really, potato fritter) and chips out of newspaper with a cold beer, helped me feel like we had made a good decision. Spending time with family, catching up with old friends and dipping my toes into the ocean at wild, west coast, black sand beach was pretty great, too.

I'm really happy to be back in this space, to share with you what we've been up to and to hear how you all are. Kia ora, from our new (old) home.

Summer Projects and Tanned Skin

tui and found leaf

Emma's blog, Small Town Stories was one of the very first I started reading and it continues to be one of my favourites. I love seeing what she's up to back in New Zealand, very near to where we hope to settle, watching her and her husband Tom carve a little life out for themselves in Featherston. She is also a very talented maker of pretty bags, brooches and beautiful prints (I hope to have one of my own one day!), to see more take a look over here! Thanks, Emma.

Summer in New Zealand falls at the end of the year, beginning in December and wrapping around the last month to begin the year in warm weather, tanned skin and swimming holes. As the working year ends, as a parting gift we’re all given a boost of serotonin, peppered with a touch of Christmas and some New Year resolutions.

Summer for me has always also meant projects. I don’t really lie on beaches. I’m pale for a start but I’m also always thinking – what can I built next, what print should I create, is there something I can sew that I haven’t thought of yet?

When I was younger, my brothers and I spent our school holiday summers building BMX tracks in the bush (forest) out the back of our house. We constructed jumps from ashes collected throughout the year, cut and hacked through branches and raked and dug and cleared pathways before spending afternoons with friends who we dared to go faster and jump higher than we knew how.

These summers I like to plant flowers and vegetables in the garden, when growing seems easiest. I like to nap in the afternoons to avoid the heat. And I like to set myself summer projects so that when I return to work I can look down at my tanned arms and know I have achieved something greater and more tactile than a few shades of darker skin.

A couple of years ago, my husband Tom and I spent two weeks clearing neck-high weeds, raking over earth and sewing grass for our back section. The summer before last I built a gate in the middle of a fence that blocked me from a great blackberry patch and painted the kitchen floor. And although this summer is still five months away for me, I know that I’ll make an edition of prints and paint the little bedroom that we hope will one day be our baby’s.

A New Zealand Summer

I am so happy to introduce to you my dear friend Tilly, for the first of this weeks guest posts. I am so happy that Tilly has started blogging, as she is one of the most inspiring people I know! She's right though, the perils of having friends from back home post is a pretty strong pang of homesickness. I miss all those faces, sights and New Zealand beaches! Thanks for stopping by, Tilly!

First of all, may I just say that it is such a treat to be guest posting on this lovely blog. I just love the space Becka has created here. Bliss in a Teacup was one of the first blogs I ever read and has been the inspiration for starting my own.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Tilly. I live in Auckland, New Zealand and  have just recently started my own little blog called A Marvellous Victory.

As Evie mentioned in a previous post, it is a bit painful to be writing about summer from all the way down here, at the bottom of the world, where winter is just settling in. Today it is cold, wet and grey and I have the fire roaring.

Living on an island means that the beach figures most prominently in all of  my summer memories. Here is my list of what makes a New Zealand summer particularly special (be prepared to miss home, Becka!): New Zealand summer means long days at the beach, surfing, bicycle rides for ice cream, sandy feet, road trips, salty hair, sun burnt toes, sand castles, rope swings, picnics, bare feet, bonfires, bush walks, Christmas, camping, canned tomatoe sauce, jandels, exaggerated freckles, beer in the sun, strawberries, frujus, coconut smelling sunblock, pre-cooked sausages, river swims, snorkeling, outdoor movies, floppy hats, boats, BBQ's and sun.

Here are a few holga images that remind me of summer. A few (marked with an +) were taken by my beautiful and  talented friend Coralee on our most recent summer holiday.  Enjoy xx

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Sunny days and kiwi tunes

Hello! Thanks so much to everyone for the birthday wishes, I had a lovely weekend! The weather in Vancouver has been amazing for the past couple of days so we made the most of it by spending as much of our time outside as possible. I had my first iced chai of the season, wore a skirt with bare legs (and no doubt blinded some people, hello whiteness!), went to a funny little jumble sale and ate delicious Belgian chocolate cake (for breakfast today, also). It was a pretty low key weekend as I realise now how I am friends with a lot of very busy people and getting them all together is damn near impossible, but it was kind of fun to spread it all out over brunches and cocktail dates (raspberry vodka and lemonade, so delicious). It's funny, I'll admit that I did let myself get a little bummed that I didn't have a big fancy party....until I remembered I don't at all feel comfortable at big fancy parties, especially not if the focus was to be all on me!

I bought myself some new shoes as a bit of a birthday present to myself, the black Toms I'd been thinking of. Definitely not a super glamorous shoe purchase but cute nonetheless and so comfy. Oh man, if you're in search of a comfy shoe for general walking about then look no further. I'm completely smitten. I'm really terrible for buying cheap and easy shoes but with the amount of walking I do with the kids and not being a driver I really needed something that was going to hold up a bit better than a pair of flats from Army & Navy (I did say cheap and easy) and I'm pretty sure these are going to do the trick! I will say that it might pay to try some on before buying these as they do fit a little narrow for those of us blessed with wide feet, but they've worn in so quickly and now fit my feet perfectly. Hooray!

It's New Zealand Music Month at the moment, so I wanted to make a kiwi mixtape for you all. It was much harder than I imagined! I knew NZ music might be a little obscure but I didn't expect things to be so easy to find, and that it would be pretty much lady free. While there are a lot of amazing female musicians from back home it was nearly impossible to find them online, and when I looked at Nature's Best, a compilation of the top NZ songs of all time, there were only 5 female tracks in the top 30! Shocking. I've decided to split it up into two mixes, one being the oldies and the kiwi music I grew up on, and the second being some of the more recent stuff to come out of the New Zealand music scene. I've tried to include as many ladies as I could, but I sadly couldn't find this gem that I enjoyed dancing around to as a young gal, or this one with the extremely questionable lyrics but secretly fantastic video clip (I was obsessed with their outfits), or even this one where none of them look at all like rock stars, but man could Jenny Morris sing.

Anyway, here it is. Enjoy!

Planning, dreaming and big decision making.

My friend Kate and I, sitting in one of my favourite NZ cafes Bazil the year before I left. Brazil, once an Auckland institution is sadly no longer there, but my lovely friend and her wee family is. Can't wait.

Happy Monday! I hope you all had a lovely Easter break, filled with chocolate eggs, spring (or autumn) time walks and the like. The weather has played a bit of a trick on us here in Vancouver, fluctuating between sun, hail, insane winds and rain I'm never totally sure what's going to happen next! We did get to go for a long neighbourhood photo walk on Saturday, eat lots of hot crossed buns, watched weird movies, made a fancy Sunday dinner, bought discount dark chocolate Lindt bunnies and did a bit of a Spring cleaning.

However, most of our weekend was spent making lists. Many, many lists. I've mentioned before that I am a list girl (and have you seen these notepad printables? Love!). I absolutely love the planning and dreaming stage, and this past week and weekend Richard and I have had to make a pretty big decision fairly quickly, hence the many lists. I think most of you know that I'm originally from New Zealand, I've been living away from there for a bit more than 3 years, first in London and now in Vancouver. I really, really love Vancouver. However, I do miss home and Richard has lived here all of his adult life so the idea of moving home either for a bit or for good has been in the back of our minds for awhile now. Last week my Dad very generously offered to fund a trip back home for my sisters wedding next March and after much discussion we've decided that instead of just a holiday we're going to be heading back indefinitely. Naturally, I'm already looking at places to live despite the ridiculousness of it being one whole year away, I just can't help myself!

To be totally honest, it has been quite the bittersweet decision. There are things we could do in New Zealand such as buy a home, live right by the sea, have a huge backyard, etc that we're unlikely to ever be able to do here. Also, all my family is in either New Zealand or Australia (no, there is no bridge in between the two. yes, I have been asked this a number of times before) and of course there are tons of friends I can't wait to catch up with. The thing is Vancouver has also become home to me. I have met fantastic people here, and what's not to love about living on the Pacific Ocean under the shadow of the Coast Mountains? When I left New Zealand, I couldn't wait to get out. As much as it is a wonderful place, it felt small and claustrophobic to me. Since leaving, like most of us do in our twenties, I feel like I have done a ton of growing up. I'm now at a point where, while things aren't perfect by any means, I feel really happy with my life. I have a job that I love, I live with my best friend and we get to work creatively together, there's a farmers market within walking distance from us in the summer, we live in a co-op, and there's a place with 200+ gelato flavours only blocks from my apartment. I am more content and happy than I have ever been, and I feel like I have figured out who I am (or am at least close to it, and yes I realise I'm saying this as an almost 29 year old with much more life to live). There is a part of me that fears moving will up end all this, if only because I still associate New Zealand with myself as someone who was feeling unhappy and trapped.

This is not to say that I'm not excited, because I really am. It's more that there is this war of feelings going on inside my head about it all, and I'm feeling a little overwhelmed! This is not unusual though, there is often a war going on between my homebody self and my anxious world traveler self. And like I said, there is excitement. I'm so looking forward to seeing my friends and family, to eating fruju's*, taking a drive out to west coast beaches, eating fish and chips (ok, just chips but it still needs to be called that) out of newspaper on the beach, road trips like this, late night bulk bin lolly runs and looking at this as a next step, not a step back. So, you should all start saving and getting ready to pack your bags, because there is a spare room waiting for you all in Aotearoa.

I wanted to do a New Zealand music mix, but 8tracks didn't have most of what I wanted so perhaps I'll save that for NZ Music Month next month. For now, here is a song and video from one of my most favourite people in the world, Dave Dobbyn, that makes me bawl every time I watch. I hope you're all having a great start to your week, or extra day off as the case may be. Thanks for listening to this long and hopefully not too indulgent post. I'm off to search out left over Easter candy and check things off my list!




*I was obsessed with this ad as a kid. Still one of the things I'd love to do before I die!