Christmas tidings

Well, that was fun.
Wally and I enjoyed a quiet Christmas.

I can't believe how much we ate and ...

slept.

I hope your holiday was just as sweetly spent.

One thing I've noticed is how important it is to unearth oneself from the mundane "everyday"

to create the rituals that matter.

for me, it's the beauty and quiet and relationships, and of course,

food!

With a bad back this month and a cold that seemed to come on like a shadow,leaving me quite weary, I let a lot slide this year.

Fortunately, Wally picked up the slack and between the two of us, we pulled together a festive holiday for two.

Wherever you are in the world, in your life, I hope you remember that there is always someone who cares, even if you haven't met them yet. I don't mean a sweetheart per se, but just someone who really gets you and knows your true heart and loves you just the way you are. Along the way, we learn that being that someone is often how we create that reality for ourselves.

Now take Muji for example, or, as I sometimes call him,  "nudje-y" (noodge is Yiddish for pestering)

Muji can be the most charming of cats,

loving to a fault, he is SO sweet, that I've often wondered how he would ever make it in the "real world", the one where he'd have to fend for himself.

"Fend for myself??"

Well, in many ways, I identify with his confusion.

And so this sweet little misfit who needs love and affection despite his 

ENORMOUS hairiness ( my goodness, I have to wear a special apron to hold him)

has found a place in our hearts

and so we've learned to endure the gravelly nagging "song of his people"

and love him just the same.

By the way, that isn't Muji's cigar case on the table, nor is it Wally's, but a co-worker of Wally's who is saving them for him ( for me ) for art projects.

I have some more pictures to share of how we spent our holidays coming up.

"stay tuned"

(Geez, I suppose only my generation knows what that means, LOL. It's like translating another language just to talk the way I always have. Part of the slide into redundancy I suppose. Did I ever tell you about the time I made a reference to Katherine Hepburn to a bright looking young woman? She said she didn't know her- as if she was a local woman. Oh please don't tell me you don't either. Well, that's what I mean about redundancy. sigh )

Christmas decorations and cats

With Christmas almost upon us, I thought I 'd share some of our decorations for the holiday.

This is the beat up lid of an old Blue Bird Toffee Tin from England that I found several years ago that I find so charming with its red thatched roofed cottages and blacksmith scene.

A cousin of mine gave me first dibs on a blind pick from a bag of gifts she'd brought to one of our family parties. I picked this old embroidered lion that is probably from India I think.

And yes, we decided to get an artificial tree a few years ago.

Every year there is always something that captures my imagination. Last year it was this tin house...

and this one.

Oh, and I also got a set of paper ornaments from India.

This old glass ornament was a secondhand store coup.

This red glass ornament came in the same package as the blue one.

And there's another tin ornament, shaped like a tag, that I got last year, inscribed with an old Deco style script that I love so much.

Quite a while back I found this glass Santa Bear ornament.

There's Muji at my feet watching every move that I make.

This is the only ornament I was tempted to get this year.

It actually does say Reindeer food. Very Cute.

Another of the old glass ornaments. I was tickled to get the original packaging too.

Two Cats and a Shoe.

Babu and Muji awake in the morning. A rare sight.

I must pass a gauntlet of cats to colour correct these photos.

Keeping it light.

Remembering the Peace, Love and Joy that is the Christmas message

today and all days.

winter evening drive

There's always a heightened sense of anticipation as Christmas nears. Sometimes it takes an extra effort as one gets older to keep the spirit of Christmas intact. It's been a discouraging year in many ways, but there have been wonderful highlights that have rekindled my faith in human nature and reassured me that good prevails.

Wally had a day off on Wednesday and unearthed me to go to Greenwood to top up our health food supplements, most importantly magnesium  which we all, cats included, take. A trip like that would leave us free to enjoy Wally's coming 4 days off.

I really mean it when I say "unearthed" as we left quite late in the afternoon.

I didn't find out til later that evening that the reason I was feeling so sluggish was because I was fighting a low grade cold. Still I enjoyed having some clear weather for this trip - a change, as it always seems to be crummy weather on the Saturdays that we've gone.

Clear weather aside, the light was already getting low and I lost quite a few shots taken from our moving car. This is a little farmhouse scene with a barn in the back that has a roof so low it appears to touch the ground as the property dips downhill also indicated by the addition on the garage in the foreground.

This was a sad little blue house that sat for sale since before we moved here over 5 years ago.

This summer new owners repainted it and put new windows and a driveway in. The wind has clearly played havoc with their Christmas decorations, but it's nice to see the house being cared for again.

This has been a treacherous week for ice with some awful accidents on the highway. I nearly fell a few times myself.  Wally slowed here as he negotiated this icy on-ramp where one is normally obliged to speed up. This is the highway on which he might normally come home on a good day, but he always takes the slow and easy route, knowing what goes on out there.

The early evening light (it was almost 4:30pm) made even this industrial area not so bad. You can see the range of the north mountain (beyond which is the Bay of Fundy) in the background.

Heading northwest here, you may be able to see all the black specks in the sky, a small indication of the thousands of crows that do an evening migration around here.

Dressed in peaches and mauvey violets, the clouds were almost iridescent.

more crows flying over this snowy cornfield.

the sun going down and it's not nearly 5 yet.

Backlit by the sunset, I suspect by the size of it, that that's a raven in the uppermost branches

of that tree to the right.

I was lucky, for all the shots I lost, to have a few decent ones of the sun setting over the farmfields.

the clouds backlit in mauve in a peachy sky

You may remember this wonderful farm scene with the 3 silos from past trips.

Though blurry, the colour is so painterly that I had to share it with you.

So many shots lost in a blur on the highway, I just barely caught this favourite house of mine as we slowly came to the corner in Kingston, Greenwood's sister town.

Looking closer, we can just make out the choirboy on the front porch. 

The eagle emblem over the door makes it look somewhat American.

Like a fuzzy1940's Christmas card, I'll end here, with more to show you over the weekend.

Have a jolly old time of it dear ones.

This festive season takes some careful negotiating sometimes. That's easy to do when we set our expectations aside and remain present to the wonder and glory of what IS.

breathing gently into this moment

remembering that the best present is presence

quiet advent to the holidays

Finally finally some sun. It rained last night, but not enough to erase our snow. It did make it treacherous though with spots of black ice. That didn't keep us from getting out.

I found this charming, Christmasy coloured book at a local secondhand store.

The spine is even prettier with its gold leafed title and daffodils.

The dedication is pretty too with its flourished script in pencil

These coloured glass "friendship balls" by Simon Bisley hang in our kitchen window all year, as has the silver plastic Christmas ball that I liked too well to take down. Besides it has a little light in it that glows at night. The temperature has been reading well below freezing which actually makes the house cozier because the oil furnace comes on to supplement our heat pump; the latter does an adequate job but leaves me a little chilled when it hits the freezing mark outside.

The kitschy tinsel Christmas bells are hanging from a Santa stocking hook that hangs over the basement door.

A pretty laser cut votive cup of frosted glass

sits on one of our new linen placemats that we got from Ikea.

Muji has claimed one of the pink chairs that Wally moved from the window to make room for the Christmas tree. We decorated the tree a week ago Sunday, together for the first time as Wally usually leaves me to do it alone. My bad back may have had something to do with it

(good for something LOL)

Precious Muji, truly a prince with all his sensitivities,

a loving and benign dictator, amidst his daylong nap.

Well, that leaves 5 posts to go til I hit 100 for the year. Lots of countdowns going on.

I hope your wind-up to the holidays is pleasant, merry and bright.

peace, my friends

spring to winter

Greetings again from our snowy Springtime wonderland.

The pictures I have to share today encompass the drive home from our successful trip to the eye doctor and our wanderings thereafter. Because I had so little charge to my battery I delayed taking pictures til we reached the heights of Mount Uniak on our northwest trip home to the Annapolis Valley.

The skies were wild again and the light low

so my pictures are somewhat blurry, but the majesty was worth recording.

Here we see one of many wind turbines

Ridiculously gigantic, I always want to call these "windmills" with their

surrealistic milling of the wind

I'm afraid my pictures don't do justice to the awesome grandeur of these cloudscapes

As we came down from the mountain, the trees changed and the farmfields began

This view is to the northeast

Looking like snow, these are outcroppings of gypsum out of which less and less "gyproc" (drywall) is made as synthetic gypsum is actually cheaper to make.

I am pleased with my Canadian version of a Gainsborough painting.

Now we are passing through Windsor and one of my favourite buildings, this abandoned textile mill, Nova Scotia Textile Limited, which is for sale many years after someone tried to renovate it.  Wally and I spend a minute fantasizing about living there and opening a gallery. I tell him (again) about my trip to the artist David Hockney's textile mill in Saltaire where he realized a similar dream

We come, eventually, to the flood plains of the Avon River with a view to Blomidon at the end of the North Mountain.

The Avon and Blomidon both "spill" into the Bay of Fundy.

We see more and more tidy farm fields, but as we near home the rain that has been spitting all along, turns into sleet and then to snow and by the time we leave the grocery store near home it is seriously snowing very wet fat blobs of snow. I'd run out of battery by then.

But here's what it looked like by bedtime.

I think I'm the only one left, besides the polar bears, who loves it.

The next morning, this morning,  the ash tree still adorned with a few Christmas ornaments

The other ash tree poses like a ballerina in her frothy tutu

The hedge is deliciously sugared

And the back yard and beyond look like February again

Beyond the hayfield to the ethereal forest's edge

Babu keeps me company

always on the lookout for something moving, the snow narrowing his pupils to slits

was that a bird?

I was surprised to find a Coptic stitched sketchbook at the dollar store ( 4 bucks) and knew I wanted to use it for fountain pen drawings, this one embellished with gold paint pen.

The cheap paper buckled with the wet paint and bled along the ink lines but I don't mind.

I hope our visit finds you well and taking pleasure in The Gift.