the bundle buggy lady

We had ventured out this morning, on a brunch-Sayal Electronics-Lee Valley tools expedition. It was bright out, but too full of that mid-January-no-fun snow, and we saw more snow starting as we got home.


While enjoying the wintry neighborhood view from the porch, I glimpsed the bundle buggy lady trudging into the wind in the corner of the landscape. Dressed in a beet red coat, she was slowly pushing a buggy of groceries and carrying a cane up the snowy sidewalk. She made slow but sure and steady progress, sometimes taking a moment or two to navigate a challenging patch of sludge or ice. I was happy for her when she discovered that pulling is easier than pushing, and I felt guilty about our own sidewalk. When we got home from our vacation we found it had snowed in our absence, and then apparently rained. We'd cleared as much as we could but...


By the time I had gotten dressed to go out she was nowhere in sight. Too bad. I love winter, and I'm certain the experience would have been worth the effort.

home from vacation

We returned from Puerto Vallarta recently, where we spent a relaxed week in the sun. We were in the old part of the city which had lovely cobblestone roads. It also has very hilly streets, which makes navigating the very tall sidewalks a an exciting challenge in some parts of town.

We spent some good time with Declan and Yujung, who came from Korea for a month to visit Declan's family. Yujung and her capable helper Declan cooked dinner for a bunch of us, and it was a nice start to our trip. We also ate at an all-you-can-eat Brazilian Steakhouse, which everyone should do at least once in their life. I asked Byron to go on a banana boat ride with me, to which he good naturedly agreed. It was an exhilirating ride but left us sore and battered, and required a day's worth of therapeutic naps and Mexican television to recover from.

We ate some local junk food and tried to find a lucha libre match to watch. We declined invitations to see bull fighting, a fiesta and time share meetings. Some whales surfaced just off the beach one afternoon while we were enjoying drinks along the Malecon one day, and a few nights we stopped by the stage in the square to watch local entertainment. A mime, a clown, some jugglers. This place drew lots of people, and I enjoyed the atmosphere.

I've recently been ok'd to resume my regular composting and gym activities, which is exciting news. I've missed the tranquility of the compost yard, and think I'm ready for another run at becoming healthier. I'm crafting myself some composting gear and we seem to have found a solution to our tiny fly problems, all in all, 2009 has been pretty good!

Christmas at our house

It's finally feeling Christmassy for me these days. We had a terrific snowstorm today, the Christmas shopping and crafting is finally all but done, Mario Lanza is singing his own special brand of fire'n brimstone style Christmas songs, and Byron and I recently put up our Christmas 'tree'.  

As a kid, I'd always gone out with my family to pick a live tree and cut it down and then hang out drinking hot chocolate and not being able to feel our toes.  The tradition continued into adulthood. My sister and her family and I and my dad would go out tree hunting, and after I met Byron he too joined the brotherhood of tree hunters.  It officially stopped being fun when we realized a few years ago that not a single member of my sister's family could take a snowball  well. The highlight of this discovery was my brother in law Ray being a wet blanket about getting one in the back.  Anyway, we opted out of this arbicide last year, and decorated our cd rack instead.  This year we did the same, and it makes me giggle with glee every time I look at it.

I've gotten an  early Christmas present, I must've been good this year :)   Byron installed a light in our bathroom so that we can try to be better houseplant parents.  The plants are definitely responding well, although we seem to have also established a thriving fruitfly community :(

I've been thinking about how people are approaching Christmas this year, and I'm pleased that so many people believe Christmas doesn't need to equal spending lots of cash or giving stuff for the sake of having given stuff.   This Christmas cheer stuff, however is great--random acts of kindness, time spent, company enjoyed,  experiencing the wonders of the season. I'd rather have this all the time and have that be enough than get a bunch of stuff just because it's Christmas.

My plant light is 'stuff', I suppose, but more than that, it's going to allow me to keep gardening thoroughout the winter, and start my garden earlier in the spring, two things that I'm really looking forward to.   Thanks, Santa!

ahh, snow!

Snow is good for the soul.   

I've just come in from shovelling, which I really enjoy. It's a good opportunity to be outside and feel productive and breathe deeply.  I admire the was one teensy weensy little fragile snowflake can, in cooperation of millions of its brethren, can bring a bustling city to a standstill.  The persistence of mother nature reminds us that for all our big heavy brains and clever technology, we're still at her mercy. I also spend this time pondering weighty issues :) The snow quality tonight has deteriorated a bit, it's mostly fluffy and too dry for snowmen, but easy to shovel.

We've gotten a load of Weather today--dry flakes of snow, big clumpy 3D snow, wet snow, powdery snow and wind.  The snow started when I got to work at 8, and I was all atwitter with glee as I watched the blizzardy winds swirl snow from the rooftops.  Finally around 9:30  I couldn't hold back any longer, and took off to do a snow assesment in the back alley, where I made two small snowpeople.  It was snowman snow! Perfectly crunchy, sticky, dense, packable snowman snow!  I left my two snowy sentinels to guard the door to the stairwell and went about my day.  By the time I departed for home, they were up to their little necks in about 5 inches of snow.  (these are snowmen 6 and 7 of 10000)

Looking forward to # 8 and beyond, we're expected to get 50 cm by Sunday night!

adventures in home ownership

it's that time of year again, the time when it always seems like the middle of the night. you get up and go to work in the dark, you come home in the dark, you go to bed and wake up in the dark to use the washroom and go back to bed and wake up later on when it's still dark to go to work again. the 'flu is making the rounds, and so is glumness and tiredness. this is nothing at all what Richard III had in mind when he got all long winded about "the winter of our discontent", but it sounds about right...

don't get me wrong, i love winter. love it. i love coming in from the cold and i appreciate the exertion of shovelling while wet snow turns my hair into a frozen nest. i love the excuse to have hot chocolate or warm honeyed milk, and i love the way a snowfall, consisting of millions and millions of teensy weensy fluffy beautiful flakes can slowly bring a whole bustling city to a muffled standstill. every season has its drawbacks though, and for me, winter is a time of feeling old and tired. i've been suffering a recurrence of the elbow/arm/wrist problems i had earlier in the year, caused by and accompanied by all sorts of barely tolerable work nonsense. what a body needs, in this sort of situation, is something fun and new, a good, satisfying learning experience or two!

byron and i embarked on some home maintenance work over the weekend; i think it was pretty routine, as far as work goes, but it felt like a real adventure. i was all atwitter with excitement as we took measurements and drove to home despot, where i happily spent less money than i feared we would have to. we have finally conquered the crawlspace under the house! the crawlspace which, in my mind, was inhabited by rabid hobo squirrels and colonies of malignant centipedes, actually turned out to be a just little space with a dirt floor, inexplicably strewn with clay pots and bricks. i discovered to my delight that i'm just the right size to sit on the entrance step and get in and out easily. we soon replaced insulation in the floor of our kitchen with a lot less effort than i would have expected. dunno how byron feels about it, but i thought it was great fun. we'll see if the eavestrough cleaning holds as much potential for amusement!

$#@%^&@!

our fair city has brought in a new waste management system, which sees homeowners paying variable taxes based on the amount of trash that they put out--i think i may have reported on this a while back. i wholeheartedly support this, and wish the new program every success. it makes lots of sense to me...if you can recycle, compost and otherwise reduce your household waste, then you shouldn't have to pay the same taxes as someone who can't bring themselves to sort their recyclables.

we have been quite smugly putting out a couple of small plastic grocery bags of trash in our tiny garbage bin every couple of weeks...we once went a month without having our garbage bin emptied because we didn't consider it full enough to justify having the garbage truck idling in front of our house during collection.

i suppose instead of being self-satisfied and complacent we should have been chaining our garbage bin to our porch and writing our address on it in big sharpie pen, and realized that we are surrounded by people who create so much garbage that they have to GO AND STEAL SOMEONE ELSE'S GARBAGE BIN in order to have properly presented garbage for the city to collect. jesus. we are now going to have to pay our fair city $50 for a new garbage bin. garbage put out in anything but an approved, registered bin does not get collected.

this is a test of my endorsement of the whole program, and of my beloved mayor miller. i don't actually know much about the man, and i do know many people who say things like 'feh, that miller, he's a bum'. i can't even recall if i voted for him, but i do like him and the things he is trying to do to make our city better. the garbage plan is an excellent one, but suffers from the growing pains associated with any kind of transition. i bet when this idea was being passed around nobody thought of a way to deal with mass bin thefts. i don't even really mind the $50 fee for the bin--apparently tons of these are being stolen all over the city, and well, someone has to pay for the production and delivery of them, right? i do sincerely hope someone at city hall figures out how to not punish people for losing their bins to theft. it was my hope that if they knew we were simply replacing a stolen tiny bin instead of upsizing to a bigger one that they would offer us a free replacement, but not dice. i can't say i blame them, really.

nonetheless, i am still pretty ticked off at this, and wish the person who stole our bin (but so thoughtfully removed the bag of garbage that was in it and left it under our porch, along with a few empty beer boxes) a bad case of bedbugs and a guilty conscience. (i also wish this on my neighbour john, and my boss at the dog food factory, for reasons that i may go into some other time). may all of them sleep badly tonight! grr.

the year of ten thousand snowmen

recently, while listening to christmas music at home one night (yes, this has already started in at the monkey house) i came to the conclusion that frosty the snowman really had the right idea; even though in the animated tv show he comes across as a bit of a witless buffoon, he has a good attitude. he knows his days are numbered (as are ours, every one of us) but he's determined to live out his days as happily as he can, rather than waste time being miserable about his inevitable melting. it seems very self-actualized and enlightened.


i remember in my youth flipping through national geographic and seeing photographs of Qin's terra cotta army and being blown away by the sheer number of them. in my more recent years, as a budding peacenik and treehugger, i've decided that i should embark on the zen-like practice of building my own army, but instead of an army of soldiers to carry out soldierly duties (ie killing, looting, and otherwise oppressing), it should be an army of ten thousand snowmen to bring peace and the sheer therapeutic joy of snowplay to the world.

i admit, ten thousand is a bit ambitious, but hey, if you're going to dream, you should dream big! last year i managed nineteen snowmen ranging from actual snow snowmen to this beautiful sculpted foam ninja snowman who is currently at large somewhere in my office.

i invite any and all snowman makers to help me in my quest. if anyone is interested in sharing pictures of their snowmen , I will be more than happy to set up a picassa web album of our growing population.

so far, this year's tally is four snowmen (not bad, considering we've only had one real snowfall). here's a couple of them, snowmeo and juliet, the famous starcrossed lovers. (juliet is leaning down from her balcony and gazing at the imploring figure of her man--the thing that looks like a ghost with a happy face in the background is the work of mother nature and had nothing to do with me.)

best wishes of the season, and happy snowplaying!