Happy Old Year!

Wow! The year is over already. I've barely gotten used to writing "2009" on cheques, and now I have to break that habit already. Life is rough!

The year did seem go by rather quickly. Maybe that happens when one ages. When I was two, a year took half a lifetime; now it takes a paltry three percent of said lifetime.

Plenty of parties were had this month: church parties, bible study parties, friend parties, family parties. A good new year's resolution might be to not party for a few weeks. Hmmm, I'll have to think on it.


This past weekend we drove south to visit the family. The weather behaved, but that meant a disappointingly green Christmas. It did snow an inch or two a couple of days later, which the kids felt warranted pulling out the snowmobile to boot around for the day.

The annual gift-giving was experienced, plus the annual stuffing of faces with delicious seasonal fare. I bought a keg of beer for the occasion, eliciting plenty of trips outside on the deck.



Little story regarding the deck. It has a number of wooden steps going up to it from the lawn or driveway. At one of these locations the bottom step is missing, so thoughtful souls strung some bailing twine between the posts as a temporary fence to deter people from using those steps. Mom also kindly advised me to steer clear of the missing step.

Problem: this twine doesn't glow in the dark; in fact, it simply can't be seen in the dark. Especially when one travels at speed...

On arriving at the homestead, I was unpacking the car and came upon the 5L keg of beer. Cradling it carefully I approached the house. I headed straight for the closest steps up to the deck, taking a bit of a running leap to clear the missing step.

Well, I remember much wrenching and creaking (as twine and nails lost a battle) and a slight bit of resistance as I sailed along. The twine didn't really slow me down and there I was, standing on the deck, tangled in this twine I hadn't noticed on the way up.

I extricated myself, opened the house door, and held out the unscathed keg. Mission accomplished!

Of course, my sister and her kids had heard the commotion, guessed what had happened, and pretty much killed themselves laughing at the whole situation for far too many hours afterward.

Perhaps this incident and others (the previous victim, some poor lady, got clotheslined in the mouth) might expedite the repair of that infamous step.

Whatever. In the end the brothers-in-law and I enjoyed ice-cold keg beer.



Kids stuffing their faces...



Sister hogging the presents and the dog.



We've had the Christmas tree up and decorated at home, but we really haven't taken the opportunity to enjoy it. I don't mean climbing it, or chopping it down to hollow it out and canoe off into the sunset; I mean just sitting near it with the lights on. The tree is in the living room, where we hardly spend any time. So it will have been up for a month, lights turned on once or twice, then taken down for another year. We could have put presents under it, but neither of us got around to wrapping our gifts for each other so we just handed them over unexcitingly.

While we're on Christmassy stuff, here's Daisy's new sweater.

there's winter

Well, this past week winter finally arrived. Sort of. It snowed for a day, but all we had to show for the storm was a measly 20cm or so. It has snowed again since, not much, but every bit helps. Or is supposed to... it's rather hard to tell whether it does.

Anyway, from now on it should be white/grey here until April and that's all that matters.

December events are well under way. We had our church Christmas program and potluck last week already. We had a white elephant exchange party with friends this past week (where instead of buying gifts you get to give away unwanted junk that's lying around the house); turns out it's a potentially amusing game.

Tonight we're off to another party, sort of a mid-season Bible study soirée. Should be fun... and delicious. The time for gorging lasts only the rest of the month! (Not that I endorse gorging, but considering how little I normally eat, I should feel justified in playing catch-up from the rest of the year.)

Tuesday evening we're going to a Messiah concert downtown. We haven't been to many Messiah performances in a number of years so it was time to go again. I believe every year is simply too often, but that's probably because I overplayed the performance at home (which also means I now have in my head a "standard" performance against which I'm forced to rate all others).

Carrie's leaving me for two days. She's off to Mexico City for two whole days for work; she is the entire Canadian delegation, merely there as a third party in a USA-vs-Mexico case. She considered staying longer to go and see some touristy stuff but decided against it. I suppose our upcoming visit in January (though not to Mexico City) will have to suffice.

Carrie's knitting again. She knit the dog a sweater (I don't want her to make me a sweater but the dog doesn't have that kind of choice); I'll have to post a picture of that shortly.