Pre-Christmas December

 

We have had at least one decent snowfall, but sadly it has not lasted, and while it is cold enough now to hope for outdoor skating in the near future, we'd love to have some snow too... We've weathered one significant storm as well, but for us it was mostly just super high winds - not even rain in place of snow. The fun piece about the storm was that it was a few nights before Grace's project was due and we were all praying for no power outages so that she could continue to work undisturbed. And the total amount of power outage we had was about 5 seconds; and looking at the outage map, pretty much all around us were huge areas of power outages! Thank you God!

 

Painting the windows is one of Mom's Christmas traditions that has managed to travel around the world with us. This year she found some particularly good pictures to work from to give us lovely windows for the season. They took a long time though! Especially since she didn't get any help because Grace and Jasmin were glued to their computers racing to finish Grace's final project on time, and Aiden his first semester's worth of work. Mom just managed to get them done in time for for our Advent evening party.

So did Grace and Jasmin. They had to pull an all nighter the last night, but Grace is completely done her degree now! The project, the production of which we have lived around for the last 3 months, will hopefully be released for viewing soon - watch for it!

The party was a great success - we'd been very liberal with our invitations, so we had a lovely full house for our evening of antiphonal readings and advent songs along with snacks and hanging out. We discovered yet more people connections we weren't aware of - it is still managing to surprise us how many people know Mom's siblings or parents, though it shouldn't considering they've lived here for 20 years...just not something we're used to :)

Added into the mix of busy days was an invitation to join the Christmas choir at our church for the Christmas eve service. So the Sunday after the girls' all nighter was an afternoon practice followed by our party. Oof for lack of sleep! And then the Monday and Tuesday following were the Christmas eve services, so our holidays started with a bit of a bang of busyness instead of rest and relax!

Tuesday we also celebrated big as a family (Dad's birthday from the 16th which we hadn't had space to celebrate, Grace finishing her degree, and Aiden getting accepted to Dalhousie)! We did the typical yet very rare thing for us and went out to eat. Dad had discovered a fantastic little fish n chips place on the Bedford highway (Rudy & Olive's) in the summer, and it was good enough that that's where we chose to go. It's just a little diner that is constantly busy so not much of a dining experience, but the food is excellent and the portions satisfying.

Banana Bonanza and a few other life's like that moments

 Flashfoods  (an app where we get a lot of our groceries from at 50%off or more) often disappoints us with showing a picture like this but what you are buying is actually a bunch of bananas. So I chose to buy two bunches at $2 each. And then, at pick up, I discovered that I'd bought 2 40 Lb boxes of bananas! So we went from banana starved (no bananas for over a month, not even frozen ones) to way more than we can eat, bake with, and freeze before some go off! So, if you're in the area... want some bananas?

We've had some exquisite beauty in the mornings lately: heavy hoar frosts and wintery sun make for a breathtaking wild beauty landscape! Of course, a phone camera held by a novice can't hope to pick up the multilayered beauty... frosty mist in the distance with frost silvered bare trees melting in around the edges, the random harmony of fall colors still clinging to some trees, sun sparkling off the frost gilded foreground grasses... 

Last winter we wrestled with our wood stove, trying to learn its quirks to keep the house warm relatively consistently without it smelling like a campground nor having to nurse a reluctant fire. This year so far we seem to have figured out a few things, but now we wrestle with a voraciously hungry roaring fire that we can't seem to dampen a bit too often. But since it is doing a much better job at actually heating the house, it's not so grievous. 

Every household experiences "that time" sometime: the one where every appliance or gadget seems to break at the same time... for us it was Jasmin's phone, Mom's laptop keyboard, Grace's monitor. All big ticket items. And yet, it happening in November is very fortunate with two important annual sales to find replacements that don't cost too, too much. And, of course, with two techies in the house (Dad and Aiden) and a thrifty Mom, there were enough bits and pieces to cobble together some solutions in-house as well. 

November rain

 November rain

So welcome to this drought dried land

And yet

The dark, dreary nature

of rainy November days

Not so welcome

Remembering the need to pay attention to weather

What coat, what footwear necessary

Slow adapters or simply protesters

Our children still often venturing out

Barefoot (or flipflops) and coatless

Learning again to keep the fire lit

Stock it just so

So heat radiates and smoke doesn't

Wonderment at our animals even still

Freda prone to dash-leaping in the pond

Bedraggled chickens pecking through their yard

Erratic morning runs

Waiting for dry days

Cold but glorious in wan Fall sun

Adjusting to afternoon dark

Pushing back against the time dislocation

Missing after supper dog jaunts in daylight

Why do we do this again?

The smell of wet Fall forest

The bursts of red berries, yellow leaves 

Backdropped on deep greens and greys

The sound of the stream running again

Thank you God

Light busting through wintery grey clouds

Rain on the windows, running in the gutters

Pattering on coats and umbrellas

Ponds refilling, streams again running

Feet squelching in cold mud

November rain

Things We've Learned from Close Proximity to A Movie in the Making

It's possible to cater to up to 500 people from a food truck!! Not that that is what happened here, but revealed in talking with the chef. He produced amazing food - The Nomad Gourmet indeed.

Movie filming doesn't happen on schedule. In fact, so much so, that the schedule is posted is without times, and the evening before is when cast and crew find out when they'll need to be at work for the next day. This was ok for us mostly as we parked our car down the drive way so we could get out when we wanted, and we don't have a strict schedule ourselves. Where it hurt more was learning the night before at 9:30 pm that we had to be gone from our house for a filming by 7 am and stay gone until after supper! Thankfully it was a day Grace didn't need her set up for school work, and we had somewhere to go for the day that worked.

Meal times are as fluid also. This messed up our family schedule quite a bit, but sneakily. We realized just how out of kilter we were one night about 11:30 when Mom (who is usually in bed if not asleep by 10:30) was still up and about and noticed Jasmin was tuning her violin to start practicing, Aiden still playing a computer game with friends, and Grace and Dad were still working full bore like it was still afternoon. Not even sure if we'd had supper yet... When lunch happens mid to late afternoon, your sense of time gets really out of sorts!

Work start and end times are strictly counted when there are child actors. Countering this is the need for flexible hours for all sorts of reasons. Days can start at 5:30 am or 11 am and end at 2 am or 6 pm. It went ok for us, but it was sure nice to have the house to ourselves again with no imposed early mornings or late nights when it was all over.

We didn't get to see the sets or watch a filming: no extra people are welcome in case of accidental, super expensive to fix noises or movement. So we are just as eager as everyone else to see the final product.

Different, interesting, unusual: an its-worth-it-once kind of experience.